Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> 2003-05-03 08:23:54, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
>
> >It is said that Korean children aren't taught the individual letters,
> >but are taught to recognize syllable blocks individually (as if they are
> >unanalyzed syllabograms), but that after a few months (still in First
> >Grade, that is) they discover the subparts that are the letters, on
> >their own.
>
> This is interesting, in that it suggests that when learning to read
> Chinese, there might be at least some awareness of the constituent
> parts of each character. I'd expect that to be so, especially where
> the radical is easy to see.

Sure. They report that upon encountering an unfamiliar character they
can almost always identify it right away on the basis of the radical and
the phonetic. (They speak the language perfectly already, of course.)

(When would it not be "easy to see"? There are just a few dozen
characters in the "hard to identify" group, and they're all very common
-- irregularities in any level of language always belong to the most
common members, since otherwise they'd just go away.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...