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+-----+ Topic: Anh huong cua viec doi moi cach viet trong viec hoc va day doc tieng Viet by Minh


Author: Minh posted on 10/9/2009 2:11:03 AM

Trường học ở Mỹ họ có ngân khoảng rất lớn với trang bị rất đầy đủ về cán bộ cho đến đến dụng cụ. Nhưng cái gì đã tạo ra sự bỏ học rất lớn trong bậc trung học của họ nếu không bắt đầu từ sự nản chí của những học sinh khi không đọc được mấy tiếng Anh (là một ngôn ngữ không có luật đánh vần)? Chuyện có thật là một số học sinh tốt nghiệp trung học ở Canada và Mỹ đã không đọc giỏi được tiếng Anh. Ngay cả khi đã tốt nghiệp đại học cũng vậy *.
Chuyện không thể đọc và viết được tiếng mẹ đẻ trong trung học trái lại đó chỉ là chuyện không thể tin đươc đối với người Việt mình. Với người Việt thì chỉ cần vài tháng là có thể đọc và viết thành thạo ngay, đọc và viết chính xác ngay cả cho những từ mà họ chưa hiểu nghỉa, chưa nghe hay đọc ra bao giờ!
Tại sao vậy? Tôi là người chẳng biết chút gì về ngôn ngữ học nhưng mà tôi cũng chắc chắc rằng được như vậy là do cách đánh vần không có luật ngoại lệ trong tiếng Việt của mình!
Cũng đang có khó khăn về ứng dụng liên hệ với điện toán nhưng gần đây cũng có nhiều phát triễn và tôi vững tin rằng rồi cũng sẻ hoàn thiện được hơn thôi nếu chính quyền VN hay những người Việt tài ba nào đó quan tâm hơn **. Cũng là điều rất quan trọng cho một số người với nhu cầu như vậy nhưng điều vô cùng quan trọng hơn là toàn bộ học sinh sơ học, tiểu học cần phải đọc và viết được như hiện nay mà không phải cố gắng nhiều để học và dạy.
Có người ở đây không tin mà hỏi tôi sao một nước nghèo như VN mà CS nói là 100% không có ai mù chữ trong khi họ với tài nguyên vô hạn thì như vậy? Cứ nghĩ đến tình trạng cơ sở và cán bộ giáo dục như hiện nay ở Việt Nam thì tôi mừng vô cùng là không hiểu do may mắn nào tiếng Việt mình lại dể dạy và học như vậy!
Trước khi đề nghị ứng dụng, bạn đã có nghiên cứu nào cho việc dạy trẻ sơ học việc đánh vần để đọc theo cách viết mới chưa?

(*) http://www.globecampus.ca/blogs/parents-view/2009/03/27/university-graduates-who-cant-read/ - http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2006/02/illiterate_graduates - http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/391159/the_illiterate_graduates/index.html)
(**)Dịch qua máy vi tính, google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&u=kenrockwell.com%0D%0A&sl=en&tl=vi

Author: dchph posted on 10/9/2009 9:59:03 AM

Polysyllabic writing fosters an ability to think abstractly and collectively

As we all have seen, only a few of us who have been lucky enough to have acquired a second or a third foreign language such as English or French are mostly the ones who can function fairly well with a higher degree success in academic and scientific fields, all requiring abstract and collective thinking skills. That ability must have been results of a cognitive process after a long period of training in academic disciplines, which has effectively molded our brain to work and see things that way.

In fact, the capabilities of thinking abstractly and colectively have helped us achieve successes in many other aspects of lives as well. We can safely assume that the process of acquiring second language, a polysyllabic one such as English, is one of major disciplines that has brought us these skills. Those, assumably, who have been left out of this intellectual circle, in every sense of it, including the economically disadvantaged, are the poor souls whose language skills have been limited monolingually with "monosyllabic" Vietnamese. Unfortunately, those people constitute a majority of overall population. Can our country progress with a large number of individuals whose brains barely function in a limpo state of mind? Think about that over and over again and you will recognize how urgent a reform is needed for the present state of Vietnamese writing system!

Anybody who knows German is well aware of the fact that the way its nouns are written appears to be the most lengthy ones among those of any other Indo-European languages, for example, Informationssystemverarbeitung (information system processing), Aufwiedersehen (see you again), Recherchemöglichkeiten (possibility research), Datenbanken (data bank), Betriebwirschaft (economic management), etc. It does not matter how long a word is, the Germans accept it as one complete word conceptually. Please note that all nouns are started with the first letter being capitalized, which may unexpectedly signify a break and also serve as the beginning of a long text string, which further fortifies the symbolistic effects of those long polysyllabic compounds. That fact implies that the Germans are highly capable of seeing things abstractly and collectively.

Contrarily, we are accustomed to seeing things in minute details, a mindset that tends to associate abstract concepts with concrete objects, individually and sentimentally. For example, we often hear among ourselves boasting that how beautiful our language is, each syllable represents and triggers an object visually and depicts a picturesque perception of a word (actually a syllable for this matter) in our mind, or how orderly our language shows with regard to social hierarchy, etc., when we should call a person by name, by title, by seniority, or by rank, etc., (in this case consider India's social classes which are still in existence!), while in many other languages, including Chinese (that used to be the same as ours for this matter), all first and second person addresses are abstracted to "I, you" in English, "wo, ni" in mandarin, or "je, tu" ("moi", "toi" and "vous") in French. It is so not because in other cultures people do not know how to respect others to address them accordingly, but because their languages have transcended, not descended, to higher abstract degree for this matter.

No matter how good our excuses are for refusing to accept that reasoning, our way of thinking, unfortunately, has incapacitated our ability to think abstractly. From the early ages when we first learned how to write our language, our teachers and parents had taught us how to recognize the relationship between spellings and sounds, but focused only on practicing how to spell out vocally syllables individually and separately. This method of teaching syllabic spellings to those youngsters 50 years ago still remains the same for our post-war newborn generations! Among us some of those who have been elementary teachers in American schools, they may have known too well about this fact: spelling curricula to teach "American" young kids to learn how to spell have been in constant changes in methodology for the last twenty years every year!

Configuratively speaking, we Vietnamese were trained to distinguish trees, but not to see a whole forest. The Americans do not teach their children that way, neither do the Frenchmen, nor the Chinese for that matter.

It seems that nobody pays attention to an agonizing fact that that limpo mental legacy has been passed down one generation after another. We all have failed to utilize our writing system properly as a powerful tool to condition our abstract and collective thinking abilities since our early age and continued to implant this retrograde mindset in our youngsters' brain and still feel proud of it!

Human beings cannot think without languages. Which language tool currently in use now, no matter how inferior it is, is the only option our kids have and learn to live with. In other words, chances are that those monolingual souls will grow up knowing to think things one syllable at a time.

It is undoubtedly that an ability to think things abstractly and collectively is important in many aspects of life. It is the keys to success in many areas, including mathematics, sciences, academics, or economics. We all were not born with this special skill; it partly depends on language training, a multifacet tool that will help people think and reason logically. Worse yet, an already badly-formed monosyllabic "gene" from previous generations is ready to pass down to the next ones.

A bad tool will certainly affect final products. A better polysyllabic language tool will trigger children' brains to develop differently for the better. Reading and writing Vietnamese texts scripted in polysyllabic formation would help children develop and enhance that special ability for sure. They will benefit greatly from seeing concrete and abstract concepts alike only in shapes and symbols rather than in dismembered syllabic spellings.

The Koreans have recognized this matter as we see in their Korean block writing system, being utilized in both of Korea's own national script and the adapted Chinese characters. They put polysyllabic characters in distinct groups for each concept-word, for instance, "hyundai" = "hiệnđại" (modern), "Dongnama" = "ÐôngnamÁ" (Southeast Asia), "fanghuo" = "phònghoả" (fire prevention), "phónghoả" (set fire), "Kori" = "Caoly" (Korea), "kamsamida" = "cảmtạ(mi)" (thank you)... If X stands for any Korean block character, you will see that Korean words all appear as XX XXX XX XX as four, not nine, concept-words. That scientific way of writing reflects true nature of spoken words -- and the Koreans' collective mindset as well -- and naturally they are processed faster mentally and in many areas of data processing. The Chinese do not write that way but their highly symbolistic characters are put one after another which will render somewhat the same effect. The Thai writing system does the same with its chained scripts written with no interuptive spacing. In other words, "seeing one catching all" is the idea behind polysyllabic ways of writing.

Writing reform is necessary but not enough, of course, to expect seeable achievements in any technological progress, which is only a premise for overall economic development. Of course, simply staging a language reform is not enough to create favorable conditions for advancement in other areas, but, at least changes in our current writing system will meet rising and immediate needs in the computing fields such as data processing or online translation. Certainly polysyllabic writing reform will help a great deal in those areas.

Let go back to the German example of "Informationssystemverarbeitung". For only the mere shape of this word a German speaker will catch the meaning of it, let's say, in a "nanosecond". Nobody is going to spell out syllables contained in that word mentally in order to understand what it means. However, with the current writing as "xử lý bằng hệ thống truyền thông" a Vietnamese brain will process in 7 "nanoseconds" or more! That is to say a Vietnamese speaker will first have to recognize 7 different shapes of the separately-written syllables. After these syllables have been perceived in his or her brain, only then that person will be able to form 4 different concept-words, and lastly he or she will be able to combine those words together to finalize the concept-phrase collectively to comprehend the meaning! In other words, it will take longer than necessary through several cognitive phases before the message come through our brain!

If we have to translate and write this concept-word the same way as it is written in German as "xửlýbằnghệthốngtruyềnthông" (processed in 1 nanosecond!) then, seemingly at first, it may be still an overkill and an annoyance to a Vietnamese speaker's eyes even though that should be the right way to do. Let's temporarily go for "xửlý bằng hệthống truyềnthông" (processed in 4 nanoseconds.) and we can continue to apply the same pollysyllabic principle for hundreds of other similar words.

If the new polysyllabic writing system were in place now, when our eyes scan of a line of text in a page, we will be able to recognize less word-shapes, but our brain will process more information at an even faster speed! Do you need more explanation about this fact? If so, your brain may be still working at the pace of one syllable at a time. It needs more language, a polysyllabic one, training then, sorry!

We have come to the conclusion that writing the way words are spoken, or the "natural way", as it should be will result in recognizing and processing concept-word-phrases faster than the way syllables of those words are written separately. Readers will not spend more time than necessary to decipher each syllable before combining them to form a word in order to understand what that after-assembled concept-phrase means. In this sense, the "composite" polysyllabic way of writing with Latin letters will similarly render the same symbolistic effects as that of an ideographic writing system, which enable us to think abstractly and collectively.

Of course, not all those nations which use the same Latin scripts to write their languages mostly think the same way. Since we are the ones who are still using monosyllabic inferior spellings, we have not made the full use of this language tool in an effective way. Let's think who else on earth is in the same boat with us? Gotcha! They are the Hmongs -- combined form of polysyllabic words appear sparingly in their writing, though -- and some other aborginal peoples living in Vietnam's Central highland who have inherited our orthography devised specially for them modeled on the existing Vietnamese system. They write the same way as we do! So we have found companions who do think the same.

Let's go back to the bamboo analogy. It seems that we are very good at distinguishing a bamboo tree in front of our front yard from another one around a corner of our village road or even a unique one in a bamboo forest. What is all the fuss about this matter? Do you still remember the reason why we are still having so many problems in the area of simple computing technology? We do not have computers that use the same font scheme system, can do spelling check correctly, or even sort our name or data lists in alphabetical order, let alone can they translate simple English websites.

The writing system we are using now is only a rather new invention with still lots of rooms for improvement. Do not take it at the bare value just as it has been passed down to us from the original inventors and treat it as something nationally sacred; it is simply a means to communicate through a set of symbolic convention. Nothing will prevent us from changing it and making it serve us better. If the new better writing convention based on the pollysyllabic principle is to be created and put into use, that will be the one that we should value and treasure, not the imperfect system that we are having now.

For such a change, we, in fact, do not advocate an extremist approach for reform such as implementing the cases of suffixes -s (-ist, -er..) for "sĩ", -z (-ist, -er..) for "gia", or s- (-tion, -ity, -ance..) for "sự", but we only suggest that everybody gives up a little bit of habit and practice to write Vietnamese the new way with polysyllabic principle -- simply combining all syllables of a word in writing, mostly two, to make it a complete word for the whole concept.

http://www.vny2k.com/vny2k/CaitoCachVietTiengViet-UniEng.htm#3) Polysyllabic writing fosters an ability to think abstractly and collectively


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NOT ALL THE CHINESE RULERS LEARN THE SAME THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM'S HISTORY. LET'S TEACH THEM ANOTHER ONE, A CHINA 911 STYLE!
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