I've noticed something odd recently about how I read signs in Chinese, in particular subway signs.
Not those Subway signs, of course, but the signs above subway stations.
 |
| Eat Fresh |
Not those Subway signs, of course, but the signs above subway stations.
 |
| Ride Fresh |
Let's break this sign down. On the far left is the Beijing Subway logo, which I learned from Wikipedia is composed of the letters B, G, and D, short for Beijing Gaosu Dianche or "Beijing High Speed Electric Vehicle." Next to that and on the top are the Chinese characters 地铁青年路站--for those who don't read Chinese, don't worry, we'll come back to this. Underneath that, in the Roman alphabet, is written QINGNIANLU Station. Obviously we know what "Station" means, but "Qingnianlu" requires some explanation. It is the name of the station written in Pinyin, a romanization system used to 'spell out' the sounds of Chinese characters using Roman letters. Finally, in the bottom right is 6号线, helpfully translated as Line 6.
So we have three writing systems on one sign: Chinese characters, Pinyin romanization, and English translation.[1] In fact, any of these three writing systems may be present in almost any combination on signs throughout China (there are even more possibilities when you get into areas of China that speak and write in other languages). I'm used to this proliferation of symbols, so that doesn't particularly confuse me. I even find it helpful when signs include Pinyin along with the Chinese characters, because that way I can check their pronunciation against my memory.
The thing is, I always naively assumed that my reading of Chinese characters and Pinyin was entirely separate: I read the characters to know the meaning, and I read the Pinyin to know the sound.[2] But this is where subway signs throw me off, because if I try to read a subway sign in this way, I can't do it. Here's why: the Chinese characters and the Pinyin don't match up.
At least they don't match in terms of word order. The first word in Pinyin is "Qingnianlu," the name of the station. But the first two Chinese characters are 地铁 (ditie), the word for subway; the name of the station comes immediately after. Translated directly, and splitting the Chinese characters into separate words, the sign would read:
地铁 | 青年路 | 站
Subway | Qingnianlu[3] | Station
So when I read the Pinyin, Qingnianlu is the pronunciation I hear in my head. But when I look up at the Chinese characters, the first characters I see are 地铁, pronounced ditie, and my brain malfunctions. It cannot process what those two characters are or what they're doing there. Which is weird, because I should recognize those characters. The word 地铁 is not all that uncommon (it's on every subway sign, for starters), and the first character, 地, is so common and so simple that it's one of the few characters I can write by hand without pausing to think about it. I should have no trouble processing what those characters mean at the start of a subway sign. But because they don't match the pronunciation I already have in my head, all of a sudden I'm 糊涂了 (hutu le ; muddle-headed).
What I think is happening is that the Pinyin 'primes' my brain to read the characters in a certain way. If I read "Qingnianlu" in Pinyin, then I will read the Chinese characters looking to match those sounds. If I can't do that, as is the case when ditie interrupts my reading, then I get confused and effectively have to do a hard reset. This would suggest that I read Chinese characters phonetically before I process them semantically; that I 'sound out' a Chinese character in my head before (or at least at the same time as) I think about what it means.
That actually makes a lot of sense to me if true. When I started studying Chinese, I struggled to connect characters with their sounds. Written and spoken Chinese felt like two different languages.[4] Over the last 10 years, as I've become much more comfortable and fluent with the spoken language (and improved my reading as well), the two have felt much more integrated. In the past where I would recognize a familiar character but have to check on its pronunciation, or hear a familiar word but have to look up its meaning, now it feels as if all of that is stored together as an entry in a mental dictionary. So now when I see a familiar character, I often connect it just as strongly to a sound as I do to a meaning.[5]
At this point, I've trained my brain out of its momentary lapses when faced with subway signs. I know what those two characters are, and I'm no longer thrown off by their disagreement with the pronunciation in Pinyin. But the fact that I was confused in the first place, and that this confusion even persisted for a few weeks before I could really look at the signs and figure out why I was struggling to read them, gave me some insight into how my brain seems to process Chinese characters. That in itself is fascinating to me (and probably only me), but I also wonder if it might resonate with other readers of second or third languages, especially as they become more familiar with both the spoken and written forms of their languages of study.
_________________________________________________________________________That actually makes a lot of sense to me if true. When I started studying Chinese, I struggled to connect characters with their sounds. Written and spoken Chinese felt like two different languages.[4] Over the last 10 years, as I've become much more comfortable and fluent with the spoken language (and improved my reading as well), the two have felt much more integrated. In the past where I would recognize a familiar character but have to check on its pronunciation, or hear a familiar word but have to look up its meaning, now it feels as if all of that is stored together as an entry in a mental dictionary. So now when I see a familiar character, I often connect it just as strongly to a sound as I do to a meaning.[5]
At this point, I've trained my brain out of its momentary lapses when faced with subway signs. I know what those two characters are, and I'm no longer thrown off by their disagreement with the pronunciation in Pinyin. But the fact that I was confused in the first place, and that this confusion even persisted for a few weeks before I could really look at the signs and figure out why I was struggling to read them, gave me some insight into how my brain seems to process Chinese characters. That in itself is fascinating to me (and probably only me), but I also wonder if it might resonate with other readers of second or third languages, especially as they become more familiar with both the spoken and written forms of their languages of study.
Footnotes
[1] I call Pinyin and English two separate writing systems here, which I'm not sure is correct, since they both use the Roman alphabet. All I really mean is that all three are different in some way: Chinese characters and Pinyin both express Chinese but differ in the symbols they use, Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet but express different languages.
[2] Actually, many Chinese characters do carry phonetic information, and you can often figure out the meaning of words from the Pinyin in the proper context. A good example of the latter is Beijing Gaosu Dianche from the beginning of this post, which someone familiar with the language and the context could figure out means "Beijing High Speed Electric Vehicle" even without the characters.
[3] I've gone through this entire post only writing the station's name in Pinyin (as the sign does), but it can also be translated into English as "Youth Street," after the name of the nearest intersecting road.
[4] There actually is an argument for this especially in other languages/dialects of Chinese such as Wu or Yue, or during earlier periods when the written form of Classical Chinese/Literary Sinitic was much further removed from the spoken language.
[5] Subjectively, I find these connections even stronger for complete words in Chinese, which are sometimes a single character but are often composed of two or more characters--for example, 地铁 (ditie ; subway).
