I'll have to check the published literature for what it says about reading instruction in Finnish. Finland has a minority of native speakers of Swedish (not a closely cognate language). Finnish (Suomi) and Swedish are co-official as national languages in Finland.
Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences.
develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction.
But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way,
and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly.
The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).
Yours is a good comment on the unreliability of Ethnologue for these kinds of language comparisons. I'll jump in here with a response to one part of your comment near the end.
All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.
That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Here is an example of a plausible conversation in Mandarin and a plausible conversation in Cantonese to show how different the two languages are, with different words (not cognate, and thus not written with the same Chinese character) in places even where you would expect English and German, or Spanish and French, to be cognate. I checked the example dialogues against dialogues posted online by native speakers of each of the languages, both for accuracy in transcribing the Chinese characters and for natural idiomatic expression in each language.
How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f...
Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm
The late John DeFrancis
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...
and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143...
develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction.
But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way,
http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html
http://www.mackinac.org/5365
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/
and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly.
The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).
All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.
That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm