02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Reading Wars of the 1990s
WHOLE-language theory holds that learning to read and write English is analogous to learning to speak it -- a natural, unconscious process best fostered by unstructured immersion. In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from ... 1 
notes
notesSite Words VS Phonics. If English was phonetical, we could focus on one strategy, but because many spellings don't match their pronunciations we must also memorize Sight Words as if they were Chinese ideograms.
12 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
English Spelling Risks Becoming Like Chinese Ideograms
Indeed, the present tendency in the scools is to dis-
regard the fonetic basis of English spelling, and to
treat the written and printed words as ideografs like
Chinese the pupils being taught to recognize a word
by its appearance as a whole, rather than by a f util
attempt to analize the supposed sounds of the letters
composing it. Vast amounts of mony and incalculable
years hav been spent in efforts, never wholly success-
ful, to teach children to memorize the intricate and
unreaso...
1 23 JUL 2014 by ideonexus
Chinese Books Lack an Index
Yet even if some technological fix were to be devised to solve the problem of character entry, the non-alphabetic nature of the writing system still results in other serious and long-standing “invisible” problems. For example, the inclusion of a standard index to books, manuals and reference materials is made orders of magnitude more difficult by the Chinese writing system. The result is that to this day, the vast majority of non-fiction books published in China do not have an index, or a...23 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Chinese Room Argument
Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese
writing. Suppose furthermore (as is indeed the case) that I know no
Chinese, either written or spoken, and that I'm not even confident that I
could recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing distinct from, say,
Japanese writing or meaningless squiggles. To me, Chinese writing is
just so many meaningless squiggles.
Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am
given a second batch of Chines... 1 notes
notesAn argument against the possibility of AI, replacing a computer with an english-speaking human being performing english-instructions on chinese symbols and outputting results. This is like a computer, which does not understand the symbols it is manipulating, but the results look intelligent.
