how is reading taught in other languages?

[Periwinkle007]

just curious, is it also through phonics?

I have a german 'first term self reading book' at home and the is level much much higher than the orange ort level 6 books dc is now reading in y1.
german is in principal a phonetic language, but many foreign words are blended into the language that aren't.

there seems to be some controversy about teaching phonics in germany, many people think that it leads to poor spelling. (write as you speak)

Cote Just that it is not all about a 'good' education with regards to speaking 'Queen's English'.

I don't know Turkish, was there more accent variation around before 1928?

Takver - Afaik Spanish is not a completely phonetic language where every letter is pronounced in only one way and there are no letter combinations. So I'm not sure why you are taking it as an example.

New vocabulary usually begins as speech before text.

Written language takes on the accent of the reader which is why I can read the word bath as bath (same sound as in cat) and my colleague can read it as barth (same sound as in father) and both are correct.

daft - That is what I was told re English. Where we live, there are many English expats. Very few have strong accents. The vast majority speak pretty much the same, although they come from different parts of the UK, including one friend who is Welsh and has studied in Wales. The reason for this conformity of accent, I am told, is that they have all gone to "good schools".

spelling reform was done in germany 20 years ago in an attempt to make it even more phonetic and in order to re-write foreign words phonetically.
didn't quite work though and stopp still looks 'wrong' to me

Re Turkish - Before 1928, it was written with the Arabic alphabet and very few people were literate. We are talking about the Ottoman Empire here with its many subjects of different origins. Accents were indeed varied.

The complete overhaul of the alphabet has no doubt reduced accent variation.

mrz Yes, language may start as being spoken but the spread of a trend can be through the written word.

Cote I think what you have said is more of a comment on our class system.

A school can be very good, teaching wise and a person can be very educated but still speak with a strong regional accent.

but the written form is still a representation of the spoken daftdame
So the pronunciation comes first

mrz Never claimed anything different, just was saying the written word can subsequently influence spoken English.

If you learn new words from seeing them written and then checking a dictionary and use the guide to pronunciation this also becomes more of a moot point.

Fact is the written word now, is an integral part of our language, disentangling cause and effect in all case scenarios becomes a difficult task.

I think that you are slightly missing the point I was making about respelling to a specific English accent. As I think mrz is trying to say, written language is not a pronunciation guide; you would have a problem even if words were transcribed in the International Phonic Alphabet because they have to be transcribed according to the accent in which they are spoken. So, an IPA transcription of 'bath' which transcribed the vowel sound as the equivalent of /ar/, as in the southern pronunciation of the word - barth- would not be 'right' to a Northerner who would pronounce the word as 'bath' (short 'a' sound).

At present, though the spelling of English words is common to all English speaking peoples who use it (apart from a few US deviations) the phonetic value they ascribe to discrete graphemes can be very different. For example, in a Canadian phonics programme I have seen the word 'marry' is grouped under the /air/ sound words because that's how Canandians pronounce the word - to us it would sound like 'mairy'. This poses no problems whatsoever (apart from the odd 'inter-national' misunderstanding when discussing phonics teaching) because the meaning of the word remains the same despite it being pronounced differently and any literate English speaker can read and understand it. Just imagine if words were respelled to one accent -it would cause huge confusion and difficulty for readers because they would be decoding the graphemes quite differently.

I have to deal with the /ar/ - /a/ confusion in my work as I'm a southerner working with northern children. It's easy to deal with at that level but just imagine it applied to thousands of words globally.

FWIW I don't think that the written form of a word has any influence on the way in which it pronounced by a literate person who has the word in their oral vocabulary.

Thanks maizie that is what I was trying to say. I agree that if a word is in your spoken vocabulary that is how you will say it when you read the written form ...in much the same way young children blending a word will "normalise" it if it is a word they have heard before.

In other languages like Italian (and also german I think) the spelling of words is more regular and people pronounce the words in the same way in different regions. People do however speak different dialects. Some of these are different enough from Italian to really be different languages. However they are not usually written down. Most people can switch effortlessly in their speech from their dialect to standard Italian. Standard Italian comes from the dialect of Tuscany. I believe one of the reasons it was chosen as the national language is because of the amount of literature that had been written in that language. Dialects in many areas of Italy are becoming much rarer. So perhaps an example of how the written language can effect what is spoken.

Agree with you there maiszie and mrz. In my original post toCoteDAzur I said,

"Although I do think the written word will have some effect on the spoken language, not sure about pronunciation."

The reason for my uncertainty is that it is a statement concerning absolutes. She was talking about Turkish, which after 1928, when they switched to their current alphabet, which she claims can only be pronounced in one way, limiting accent variation.

I was trying to imagine the possibility of this concept and I must say it has peaked my interest somewhat.

It is not a "claim"

Each letter in the Turkish alphabet can only be pronounced in one way and there are no letter groups. Therefore, if you can recite the alphabet, you have no choice but to correctly pronounce the words. There is nothing left to the imagination.

Imho, it is an example of how simple 100% phonetic spelling can reduce variations in accent.

Cotton gave Italian as another relevant example. My Italian is very basic so I did not mention it,earlier, but my understanding is that it is also quite phonetic (although there are letter groups) and accents are not that different from each other. Milanese accent for example is only noticeably different from that of Ventimiglia in intonation and speed.

I wonder how quickly Turkish children get onto chapter books!!

Sorry Cote just using the word 'claim' in terms of reporting what you said. It wasn't meant as a comment on the accuracy of what you said.

I am fascinated by this idea... It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to have this happen to your language. I don't question the possibility, at all, just trying to put myself in the shoes of the people at the time. More far reaching than decimalisation I would imagine...

Is this the sort of thing Masha wants?

Daftdame, I am pretty sure it is the same with swiss german too. So people speak swiss german at home and there are different versions in different areas of the country. Then at school they learn to read and write in standard german which they can speak as well, to anyone from Germany or another area where the dialect is different. So in other cultures people are happy to speak several versions of their language only one of which is written down.

People often make a distinction between written and spoken language. So for example in medieval europe people wrote mainly in Latin while speaking their own language.

Another one is Chinese. The link between written and spoken language is not there. That is because each word is represented by a character (picture symbol) which doesn't tell you how to pronounce it. One advantage of this was that people could speak different languages (mandarin, Cantonese etc) but use the same written language to communicate.

Just goes to show how flexible people are really.

I understand your point CottonWoolWrapper, people talk in dialect here too, after all. Some traditional songs etc are written in it and a lot of fictional speech is written in an approximation of dialect.

My earlier point was in reference to Turkey changing the alphabet in 1928 from the Arabic to their current one.

Each letter in the Turkish alphabet can only be pronounced in one way and there are no letter groups. Therefore, if you can recite the alphabet, you have no choice but to correctly pronounce the words. There is nothing left to the imagination.

Imho, it is an example of how simple 100% phonetic spelling can reduce variations in accent.

I wonder if it's more due to the fact that the 'respelling' of the language started with a largely illiterate population and a radical change in the symbols used to represent the phonemes?

It is interesting, though hard to believe!

That is because each word is represented by a character (picture symbol) which doesn't tell you how to pronounce it.

I'm afraid that isn't actually true. Chinese characters are not purely logographic; there is a phonetic element to them. From what I have read you need to master some 2,500 - 3,000 symbols to become truly literate and the learning of them takes years and years. Much longer than learning English letter/sound correspondences. Perhaps the spelling reformers should turn their attention to Chinese

Maizie, I think that there was a move to use pinyin instead of characters but not even the communists were able to push that one through. Chinese is the oldest written language still in use. I can see why people weren't keen on jettisoning 1000s of years worth of their cultural heritage just because it might be more practical to do things differently.

Perhaps there wasn't the same attachment in Turkey to using the arabic symbols.

learnandsay - Let me put it this way: DD learned to read French last winter. Then we went to Turkey for holiday, and she got an Angry Birds comic book. Within about two days, she was reading it. And also reading menus at restaurants, signs on the road, etc. I didn't even teach her the alphabet. Just told her about the "unusual" letters - c is pronounced "j", ç is "ch", "g with a bar over it" is "soft g" etc.

English took her the longest, but she started reading fairly soon after she got into Tintin comic books. I suspect that she mostly infers the word from the context, though.