"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…

This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters ("hanzi/kanji") by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of…

Chinese characters are often viewed as a premodern or incomplete form of literacy. Authors with an autonomous view of literacy view Chinese as a concrete, homeostatic language inadequate for use in abstract thought and movement toward mass literacy. Even those with an ideological model framework propose that the intrinsic nature of Chinese…

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…

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)

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…