Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

Recounts observations and experiences made while on an educational junket to Peking, Canton, and Shanghai. (RL)

Describes an answer analysis system, called Answer Pattern Manager, that solves the difficult problem of recognizing student reproduction of spoken Japanese sentences. It allows all reasonable Roman spellings of Japanese words, while at the same time detecting mishearings and distinguishing between important and unimportant words. (Contains eight…

Reports on a study to determine whether students of Chinese read faster when the text is written in characters than when written in Romanization. Results show reading efficiency as determined by speed and errors in translation to be greater with Romanization, while there is more overall accuracy with characters. (CLK)

To master the subtleties of Chinese takes years, but most Americans can learn some basic spoken and written Chinese in a matter of weeks or months. A new phonic system, Pin Yin Romanizing System, tones, structure, and characters, and a comparison of Japanese and Chinese are discussed. (MLW)

This study investigated the effects of using Romanized spellings on beginner-level Japanese vocabulary learning. Sixty-one first-semester students at two universities in Arizona were both taught and tested on 40 Japanese content words in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program. The primary goal of the study was to examine whether the…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

First-year students of Chinese at the United States Air Force Academy (n=60) were tested for reading speed and comprehension of Chinese passages presented either in characters or romanization. Students read faster and understood more in romanization than in characters. (LMO)

Kanji are a component of the Japanese writing system that originated from Chinese characters. There are about ten thousand kanji in use in Japanese literature, but knowledge of only the 2000 most frequently occurring of these is needed to be functionally literate in Japanese. The present study, therefore, aimed to address two questions: (1) What…

A study examined the effects of literacy in a Roman alphabet on the performance of Hmong refugees in a three-month program of English as a second language (ESL) and cultural orientation located in Thailand. Upon registration, information was gathered from program participants on previous education and reading ability in Hmong. The 114 subjects…

This Chinese-English glossary provides a ready-reference to all lexical items introduced in the 180 lessons of the Chinese-Mandarin Basic Course. The contents are arranged alphabetically from Chinese to English. Each entry has a reference number that corresponds to the lesson number of the basic course in which the item was introduced. (NCR)

This programed text for learning to read Thai was originally designed for students having a grounding in Thai phonology and some facility with the language, but it has been made useful for students without this background by the inclusion of a summary of Thai phonology and the use of romanization. The text is organized according to the three…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…

The three purposes of this guide are to provide information on the Khmer language, alphabet, and educational systems which will be useful to Americans teaching English to Cambodian refugees; to give specific suggestions for teaching Cambodians to write the English alphabet; and to provide teaching materials that deal with the particular…