I've had a unique experience when practising Mandarin with Duolingo.
Sometimes, when asked to translate a sentence into English, I find I recognise some of the characters and know what they mean, but I've forgotten how they're pronounced!
This leads to a strange situation where I can understand the meaning of a sentence, but it doesn't "play any sounds in my head" as I'm reading it.
On reflection, I realise that this is an unprecedented experience in my life. All the languages I have ever learnt have had phonetic alphabets. I have often had the experience of encountering a new word that I didn't know the meaning of, but could pronounce.
Chinese is the first language where I've had the opposite experience. I'm encountering words that I understand, but can't pronounce.
I've often read that "language shapes thought", and I'm curious to see where this leads me. In what different ways am I going to learn to think, when faced with such situations?
Incidentally, 我明白 wǒ míng bái ("I understand") literally means "I bright white". In other words, a lightbulb just came on in my head. [The word 明 míng ("bright") evokes an image of brightness because it has the ideographs for 日 rì ("sun") and 月 yuè ("moon") within it.]
A lightbulb has really just come on in my head.
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