Chinese students for example if they were to read a page from an academic article or a passage from a book and they don’t know a character how do they deal with it? Like in English class I pretty frequently encounter words I’ve never seen before or don’t know the meaning of but when reading I can often pronounce it right based on the spelling and not have to disrupt the flow. I know most characters have a phonetic component but in my experience they can be so different that guessing based of it alone would make a totally different word, not to mention the amount of homophones in mandarin.
In the moment? Nothing to do, but 有邊讀邊
I asked my wife’s aunt this when we were in China and her response was exactly 有边读边，没边读中间 haha
Yeah just make it up 😂 I'll say the word in closest form to it if i have to read out loud
People do this, but they also get made fun of for it as an adult, at least for non-super rare words, since its obvious when you guess a wrong probunciation from the parts. Obviously this only applies to post graduate natives, if you are still in school or non-native its normal not to know.
Look it up in a dictionary(APP or a real one) or Google it. Or use a handwriting input method, which will usually provide the pronunciation.
When reading, just guess it, or ignore it, or admit to the audience that you can't pronounce the character.
btw, what do you guys say instead of "google it"? is there a slang that includes baidu's name or something? 😅
I think we usually just say to search it. 搜索一下 afaik there isn’t any slang that includes Baidu’s name.
I've heard 百度一下 a while ago, not sure how prevalent it is these days
I don’t know anyone who actually uses Baidu. They are more likely to search the word on taobao and buy the first hit.
This is not entirely a language issue; the main problem is that nobody uses Baidu anymore. People generally use Douyin, WeChat, XHS (and various AI). Those who still use search engines are more likely to use Bing.
For contact dictionaries are usually organized alphabetically by radical.
i like how you write APP in caps lol
Wait until you hear how some people pronounce "app"...
A friend told me they just guess it or ignore it, which is wild to me
Guessing isn't that weird, because a lot of times they already know the vocabulary in spoken form.
There are several clues for guessing:
For example, you're reading about food, and you come across 去年我一次都没有吃麦当劳薯条。 and don't know what 麦 or 薯 is. Scanning the rest of the sentence it seems like 当劳 is weird. You have a hunch they aren't actually functioning as their usual parts of speech, and might be part of a proper noun. You realize it matches the back half of McDonald's, so 麦 must be mai4. After figuring out McDonald's you quickly can deduce that 薯 is shu3 because fries are the most famous menu item that ends with 条. The grass radical and the component 者 reinforce your conclusion that the character is tuber.
Just to clarify when I said wild, I didn't mean "that's so weird, I've never heard of context clues what is that" but more so "I'm so impressed that they know so many characters and are familiar enough with radicals that they're able to do that, and my jealousy of native speakers has once again risen to new heights"
It's not wild. You likely do the same in English (or whatever your native language is).
For example, while reading Game of Thrones, I found a bunch of new words I'd never seen before, and I'm fairly well read. The vast majority of the time, I inferred their meaning, or basically knew what the author was trying to convey, even if it wasn't a perfect understanding. Any time I couldn't, I could either choose to ignore it, or look up the word in a dictionary.
Exactly this. And English isn’t a phonetic language either. There are plenty of words where the spelling only gives you a hint to the pronunciation and you just have to guess it.
?? English might be less phonetic than Spanish but it's sure a lot more phonetic than Chinese
It is more phonetic than Chinese. But Chinese still has some phonetic components and English has words with pronunciation that doesn’t match the spelling. The logic behind how native speakers deal with writing they don’t recognize is pretty similar.
I mean yeah, it is and it isn't at the same time.
It feels inconceivable to me to just skip words in Chinese because it's so difficult for me to even guess what the pronunciation is, but at the same time it feels utterly natural to anyone reading Chinese as their native language. So yes it is completely normal, but emotionally, it doesn't feel normal to me. Which I think is a testament to how difficult Hanzi is for people to learn.
Just like me for real
But honestly I don’t see it as that strange. I read a lot of older books for school and I am constantly seeing words I do not know. Given how irregular English is, sometimes it’s difficult to infer the meaning just by the word itself. But the context around it is usually enough to get by without the word.
I feel like this was the strategy they taught in elementary school. If you don't know a word, read around it and come back to it later.
It literally is and it’s funny to see “inferring unknown vocabulary meaning from context” as some mind blowing trick. It’s literally how one reads in every written language. It’s just that phonetic languages let you guess the sound, Chinese doesn’t as much (but there are still often clues)
Omg y'all, please see my comment above, I am not calling "inferring from context clues" weird or strange. I am saying it's impressive and I'm jealous. This is getting out of hand and I did not expect everyone to jump in to brag about how advanced their reading skills are.
I am well aware it’s not a trick I invented but the average literary level is a lot poorer than you believe. In America at least, this is difficult for people to understand. Education sucks.
Is it? When you read your native language and you come across a word you don’t know don’t you also just guess or ignore it?
If you’re a responsible reader you might look it up but most people can’t be bothered
As an anecdote, I remember when attending a church in China, the kids who did the readings would first look them over with an adult before the mass to make sure they knew all the characters.
Guess the meaning. Mentally filtering. Cursing 这啥
It's actually easier than in English to guess the meaning because you the characters contain clues regarding the meaning. But otherwise, people generally learn new words by encountering them in different contexts and sentences and inferring the meaning from them. You can look up new words in a dictionary, sure, but I'm pretty sure most people only learn a small part of their vocabulary that way.
And pronunciation is not that important when reading a text, even though generally you can make some educated guesses based on character components. It's not like pronunciation's that straightforward in English either.
English words contain clues regarding meaning as well, to be fair
Yeah it’s usually a guesstimate based on radicals
If we don’t know the character pronunciation there’s basically zero chance we’ll know what it means, so it’s really just a matter of trying to gather meaning through context
And if it’s really strange and any phonetic element eludes me I just read it as ”什么”in my head
You know you're in trouble when you start saying 什么什么什么什么 and you know you're missing the subject, verb, and object.
有边读边没边读上下
When I was little I replaced every character I didn't know with "something". Nowadays, my brain makes up a sound for it based off other characters it looks like. If I can guess the meaning or the meaning is not crucial to the meaning of the phrase/sentence, I leave it until I've seen it more than a few times in a short while. If I've no idea what it means after taking in the context I'll search the word up in the dictionary.
We have a term called 秀才识字识半边, means phd in ancient times, read the words from half of word. Means even knowledgeable people still fake it sometimes. I might read some words wrong, but people still can understand or learn it from a daily basis. Hope this helps, I really not good at translate ancient Chinese terms to English
Same as in English.
If you are reading and come across a word you don't know... you might be able to pronounce it (maybe not) but to will try to understand by context. Or dictionary. Or ask someone. Sometimes you can discern something about the word if you recognize suffix or prefix or Latin/ Greek.
No different in Chinese. Often times there is a clue how to pronounce it due to it's constituent components. And it's constituent components also give a clue regarding what the word is related to.
Homophones are not really a problem with disyllabic words and context.
some will guess based on the radicals but probably ended up opening Baidu.
You can often guess based on the character and context, but generally when people read from something aloud they'd be familiar with the text. In other situations you just look it up.
I always write down words or characters and look it up later. I'm not a student anymore so I'll just pull out my phone and take a picture of it. I'm not sure what I'd do in modern classrooms.
I was lucky enough to have really supportive teachers in school so if I didn't have the opportunity to use the Internet I'd definitely just ask, if a teacher meets curiosity for learning with punishment they're not a very good teacher.
In Chinese it usually takes more than one character to mean something, so I usually just guess it based on the context.
大多数用偏旁和部首能猜出来啊，对于母语者
To pronounce the component which you are recognized in the character that you don't know
If Mom is around: ask Mom
Otherwise: Make a silly sound, like a tongue click or some other sound effect when I reach the character
Say another character with the same radical, they often sound similar (but not identical most of the time)
If I recognize a radical, I just go off that. If I don’t, I look at the middle part and guess what character it looks like.
我们看字典如果是一个不认识的词
秀才識字讀半邊
/s Centralize it into a schwa
I don't know what they do, but I really LOVE this situation. It looks SO funny when they can't write teir own characters.
As for me, I would use a dictionary to find out a word's meaning.
Dictionaries exist
In the moment I mean
I mean the same thing as any other language.
You infer from context, especially by looking at the prefix/suffix (radicals) of the word.
You can stop reading, look up the word, and continue reading.
Same as you would in English.