Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Actually "read a lot" is much more important for Chinese than it is for languages with phonetic scripts. Learning 25-50 symbols and sounds only takes a matter of hours. But reading Chinese is definitely a skill that must be practiced all the time, writing by hand even more so. Even native speakers lose the ability to read at an acceptable speed fairly quickly (about 6 months) when they don't read anything at all --- if they immigrate to another country, for example, and don't have access to any reading materials. And non-native speakers, like myself, have to use it almost daily to stay up-to-date. Much easier this day, of course, with the internet.
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Yes, that's true, but for me it's a different dynamic. With Chinese for example, it's significantly harder to read/write than it is to speak the language (listening to Chinese, context becomes more important and the accents, but with reading, there's no mistaking the context of the meaning of the word--assuming you remembered the ideogram or the ideogram combination).
Very different from English where if you know how to read/speak it, it's more or less the same in conversation.