Post by @panda_abyss@lemmy.ca

2026-11-03 16:20 UTC

But it worked for AI with BERT, so it will work for kids, right?! /s I know phonics has issues but at least it creates an internal framework to figure things out. No idea how this new system works, but phonics doesn’t preclude contextual reasoning and it’s tried and true for ages. How do my symbolic writing languages work?

Replies (1)

@Rinn@awful.systems 2026-11-04 12:06

Chinese is a ton of memorization and figuring things out from context, mostly (source: am an adult learner, been learning for about a year now). I’d say it’s not directly comparable to learning spelling of any latin-alphabet based language (source: english is my second language, I had to learn it the hard way when I was old enough to remember the pain of it). But interestingly enough a lot of characters do have some clues in them, either for pronunciation, meaning, or both. You start to see the patterns after a while. Basic example: 妈妈 (ma1ma - mother), 妈 character consists of 女 (nü3 - woman), and 马 (ma3 - horse). Woman part is related to the meaning, horse part is a pronunciation clue since it’s also a ma sound (albeit with a different tone). But even with the clues you have to sit down and just memorize a ton of characters, which is not what the 3 clue system is doing.

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