NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/selfimp/878

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-28 | 1.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!pagesat!netsys!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!zen.sys.uea.ac.uk!jrk
From: [e-mail] (Richard Kennaway)
Newsgroups: alt.self-improve
Subject: seeing meaning
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Date: 27 Jan 93 17:00:31 GMT
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Organization: UEA School of Information Systems, Norwich, UK.
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English being my native language, when I look at a page of English text,
I cannot avoid seeing meaning in it.  It leaps off the page
involuntarily.  I don't have to "read" a newspaper headline.  One glance
and I know what it says, by a process as unconscious as knowing that 2
and 2 make 4.

I only know a little Dutch.  When I look at Dutch text, I automatically
see words, but nothing larger.  Even when I understand each of the words,
and all the grammatical constructions and idioms, I have to puzzle out
the meaning of phrases and sentences slowly and deliberately.

I know no Greek at all, but I recognise the alphabet.  When I look at
Greek text, all I see is letters.  To see words -- that is, to know the
sound of the word, rather than just seeing the space before and after
that tells me there's a word there -- I have to go through it letter by
letter.  The sound does not leap from the page into my imagination.

As for Arabic, I have only a slight acquaintance with its script.  In
Arabic text, I cannot even see letters without effort.

Can anyone suggest how one may learn to "see" meaning at a glance instead
of having to "read" it step by step?  Language learning is the obvious
context for this, but it would be relevant to other cases of knowledge
acquisition as well.

--                                ____
Richard Kennaway                  \ _/__    School of Information Systems
Internet:  [e-mail]       \X  /    University of East Anglia
uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk      \/     Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.