word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically --
\write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.
为了说明音形一致的语言所具有的优势，我不妨举一个很普通的例子好了。我在法国的时候，总是碰到同一种情况（我又把法语拿来当做“好学”的外语样本了）。有天我在巴黎，早上醒来之后顺手把收音机打开了。有段广告正好插进来了，然后我反复听到一个法语单词 \。 \这个amortisseur是什么意思？\我自己问自己。但是因为当时在赶一个约会，我就很匆忙的离开了我的公寓，这个单词也就忘了查。几个小时之后，我正在街上走，突然我发现有一个告示牌上写着单词 \今早我听到的那个法语单词。在单词下面，画着一个避震器。啊~所以 \是避震器的意思啊！看，我就这么又快又好的记住了一个新单词，而这完全是因为，我在读这个告示板的时候脑子里自动脑补出来的单词发音，跟我早上在收音机里听到的发音，两者彼此共鸣，增强印象，所以我一下就记住了。在这件事发生后的下一周，我又数次见到了这个单词。我只需要默念一遍这个单词，就能重构这个单词的发音。只要不是很久不看，否则我可以轻易的回忆起这个单词，还能把它放在对话里，或者用在给朋友的信里。这让学习外语的过程，变得不再那么可怕。
When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first
look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.
我第一次去台湾的时候，在那里呆了几个月。情况在那里完全不同。我被淹没在一片汉字的海洋中。所有的字看上去都挺有意思的，但是我根本不知道怎么读。我随身携带了一本英文版《新华字典》，看到不认识的字就查一下，但是在人潮涌动的街头上，想要查字典根本不可能（一会还要详说一下查字典的问题），所以我没办法像在法国的时候那样得到有关发音的提示。在台湾，我可能会路过一个卖避震器的商店，但是除非我先查字典，否则我根本不知道广告牌上“避震器”这三个字怎么念。就算我这次查了字典，但是下次我再路过这家店的时候，我可能还是要再查一次字典，以回忆起这三个字的发音。如此往复的循环。看字形并不会给你的发音带来任何帮助。
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates. 4.因为你不能通过同源词走捷径。
I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. \\random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having
never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
我仍记得一次很有意思的经历。那时候，我已经刻苦的学习了三年汉语。有次，我偶然发现我邻座的桌子上有份西班牙语的报纸。出于好奇，我拿过来看了看。“嗯...”，我自己对自己说，“我此生还没学过西班牙语呢，真是好奇这份报纸自己能看得懂多少啊。”我随便挑了一篇短文就开始读了。这篇短文讲的是一次坠机事故。然后我发现，只要稍加猜测，其实我是能读懂这篇文章的大意的。这起事故发生在洛杉矶附近。186人遇难，无一幸存者。飞机在起飞一分钟之后就坠毁了。黑匣子里的录音并没有证明飞机坠毁前遇到了紧急情况，同时塔楼也没有收到紧急呼救。这架飞机在三天前刚刚被保养检测过，当时并没有检测出任何机械故障。还有一些其他内容。读完这篇文章之后，我突然意识到一个悲剧的事实：虽然我没学过哪怕一天的西班牙语，但是我读西班牙语的报纸还是要比读汉语报纸轻松的多，而且那时候我已经学了三年多的汉语了。
What was going on here? Why was this \was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up. I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.
这到底是怎么搞的？为什么西班牙语的报纸就这么好理解？原因是显而易见的：同源词----这些词只不过是英语单词的变形罢了。我能把那篇短文读下来，是因为短文中的大部分关键词都跟英语差不多： aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia，等等。你会轻易发现，这些西班牙单词只不过是伪装过后的英语单词罢了。不用说，这些准英语单词可比汉字（没准汉字是准火星文）好记多了。
Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork (\you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.
想象一下，你现在是个糖尿病患者，你发现自己在西班牙，并且急需打胰岛素。你可以火速冲进大夫的办公室，只要你会一丢丢的西班牙语，大夫再稍微联想一下你说的是什么，那你的命就保住了。（英语和西班牙语中“糖尿病”的写法一样，“胰岛素”也只差一个字母）这要是在中国，你保准死翘翘了，除非你手里正巧有本字典。而且说不定在你狂翻字典的时候，“胰岛素”的“胰”字还没查出来，你就已经咽气了。说到字典，我又情不自禁想起了下一个槽点...
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. 5.因为光是查个字典就已经够复杂了。
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.
汉语有很多不可思议的难点，其中之一就是，光是学会使用《新华字典》的难度，就抵得上学会秘书学校一整个学期课程的难度。我在台湾的时候，听说有些高中还举办过查字典大赛。想象一下吧，有
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