part 7

60 In picture writing, each picture represents a word; you need a different picture or mark for each word. In present-day Chinese writing most of the marks are not pictures of anything, and a reader has to learn how the Chinese write about two thousand of these words before being able to read a newspaper. With some of these marks you may be able to see what the idea is. For example: The sun and moon. Its meanings is: "bright" and "open." A man and two marks. One of the meanings is "humanity." Learning to read Chinese is much harder than learning to read English. But in word-writing like Chinese the same marks can be read as having the same meaning in different languages; for example, in Mandarin, in Cantonese and in Japanese.

在图画写作中，每张图画代表一个词；每个单词需要不同的图片或标记。 在现代的汉语书写中，大多数的标记都不是任何东西的图片，一个读者在能够读报纸之前必须学会如何写大约2000个这样的单词。 有了这些标记，你可能就能明白这个想法是什么了。 例如：太阳和月亮。 它的意思是：“明亮”和“开放”。 一个人和两个目标。其中一个意思是“人性”。 学习读中文比学习读英语难多了。 但在像汉语这样的文字书写中，相同的符号在不同的语言中可以被理解为具有相同的含义；比如普通话、粤语和日语。

61 In time some people discovered how to represent the sounds in words by marks. In any language there are only a small number of different sounds. By writing down marks to represent sounds, not ideas, people can spell any of the words in a language with only a small number of marks. Every written language today has its spelling system. The hardest languages to spell are those in which—as with English—many of the letters may represent more than one sound. Here is the complete Roman alphabet in which English and many other languages are written. Something written in English has a meaning only if it is read as English, because the letters in English represent English sounds. What is written in Italian must be read as Italian.

随着时间的推移，一些人发现了如何用记号来表示单词中的声音。 任何语言都只有少数几种不同的声音。 通过写下标记来代表声音，而不是思想，人们可以用少量的标记来拼写一种语言中的任何单词。 今天的每一种书面语言都有自己的拼写系统。 最难拼写的语言是那些许多字母可能代表不止一个音的语言，比如英语。 这是完整的罗马字母表，英语和许多其他语言都是用它来书写的。 用英语写的东西只有读起来是英语才有意义，因为英语中的字母代表英语的发音。 用意大利语写的东西必须读成意大利语。

62 Here is the name of the book English Through Pictures written in a number of different languages. The names of the languages are given in English.

这是用多种语言写成的《图文通读英语》这本书的名字。 这些语言的名称都是用英文给出的。

63 Here are the twenty-six letters used in English with the English names for them spelled out after them. Some of these letters are used not for one sound only, but for any of two or three or more different sounds. The letter a may have the sound of a in bag, part, again, say, was, any, or fall. The letter e may have the sound of e in bell, week, older, earth, or hear, or it may have no sound but only an effect upon other sounds which come before it. The a and the g in bag have different sounds from the a and the g in age, for example. Reading English is not as hard as reading Chinese, but it is harder than reading a language in which each letter has only one sound.

这是英语中使用的二十六个字母，后面附有它们的英文名称。 这些字母中的一些不仅仅用于一个音，而是用于两个或三个或更多不同的音中的任何一个。 字母a可能有in bag， part的读音，比如was， any或fall。 字母e在bell、week、older、earth和hear中可能有e的读音，或者它可能没有发音，只是对前面的其他音有影响。 例如，bag中的a和g与age中的a和g发音不同。 读英语不像读汉语那么难，但比读一个字母只有一个音的语言要难。

64 Are some of the sounds used in one language very unlike any of those used in another? Yes. You may have felt in learning English that some of the sounds it uses are strange. But if you do not have a well-trained ear, you will not hear English words as they are heard by an Englishman or an American. You will hear the nearest sounds in your mother language. A good way of learning to make the sounds of a new language is to use recordings which have spaces after each sentence giving you time to say what you have heard before the next sentence comes.

一种语言中使用的一些发音是否与另一种语言中使用的发音非常不同？ 是的。在学习英语的过程中，你可能会觉得有些发音很奇怪。 但是，如果你的耳朵没有受过良好的训练，你就不会像英国人或美国人那样听到英语单词。 你会听到最接近你母语的声音。 学习一门新语言发音的一个好方法是使用录音，每个句子后面都有空格，让你有时间在下一个句子出现之前说出你所听到的。

65 There are machines which will play back to you again and again, one after the other, the sounds you have made and the sounds you were attempting to make. When you hear what you are doing wrong you can try to do better next time. For most children, new sounds are easy to make when they hear them, and children seem to hear new sounds better and more easily than grownups do. If a family goes to China, or France or Finland (to take three countries whose languages are very unlike one another) the children will learn to talk Chinese or French or Finnish much more quickly than their parents will.

有些机器会一遍又一遍地向你播放你发出的声音和你试图发出的声音。 当你听到自己做错了什么时，下次你可以试着做得更好。 对于大多数孩子来说，当他们听到新的声音时，他们很容易发出新的声音，而且孩子们似乎比成年人更容易听到新的声音。 如果一个家庭去中国、法国或芬兰（以三个语言差异很大的国家为例），孩子们会比他们的父母更快地学会说汉语、法语或芬兰语。