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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.