

Which reads faster, Chinese or English? - nameless_noob
http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or-english/

======
tokenadult
I read English (my native language) and Chinese (my undergraduate major
subject). I have been reading articles about reading speed of second-language
speakers of Chinese since my first year of study of the language, back in the
1970s. There is a very strong impression among persons who read both languages
that reading Chinese is faster, but the experimental finding, over and over
over, is that for a given reliable level of comprehension, reading speed does
NOT differ in a way that favors Chinese for most bilingual readers, whether
their first language is Chinese or their first language is English.

The late John DeFrancis, who through his innovative textbooks was the first
teacher of a whole generation of Americans who succeeded in acquiring Chinese
as a second language, was a co-founder of the Journal of the Chinese Language
Teachers Association, and author of a fascinating article titled "Why Johnny
Can't Read Chinese." The Chinese writing system (no matter which form of the
spoken language, ancient or modern, it is applied to) is full of ambiguities
and other partially cued information that slows down reading--as is every
other writing system in the world. By dint of much practice, I can read
Chinese comfortably for information on a variety of subjects. By test, I was
one of the most proficient readers of Chinese among second-language learners
who participated in the norming rounds for a Test of Chinese as a Second
Language in the mid-1980s (which I think was never rolled out into regular
use, perhaps because it showed that most learners learned more Chinese from
overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese).

Hacker News readers who would like to learn about English, Chinese, or other
writing systems would be well advised to read the specialized articles in The
World's Writing Systems

[http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-
Daniels/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-
Daniels/dp/0195079930)

edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. The article on Chinese is very
good, and the overview articles that discuss general features of writing
systems are also very good.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese
    

No surprise there. It is hard to learn a foreign language to a high level of
fluency without constant background exposure.

~~~
dextorious
Most Europeans learn English (as a foreign language) without a "constant
background exposure". And in my country, most people learn German and French
(two popular choices for a second/third language) without constant background
exposure, too.

So the fact that "most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence"
_is_ a surprise.

~~~
jff
Simply living in the modern world gives you a constant background exposure to
English.

~~~
dextorious
Not really --you have to tune in to that, too.

I personally met people in California that speak spanish (mexican immigrants),
who don't seem to care about learning english all that much, despite living in
the US for a decade or so. That is because of the large spanish speaking
community there. Even more so in a country where english is not the native
language. You can just ignore the "constant background exposure".

It's not like Lady Gaga being in the charts means people also pay attention to
what exactly she sings. Even for US movies European countries either use
subtitles or have the dialogs spoken in the native language (the second option
sucks, btw).

------
frobozz
All written languages are essentially logographic in the eyes of a literate
user of the language.

Given his "dragon" example, A literate native speaker of English, who is
familiar with the word "dragon" would not read "d. r. a. g. o. n.", then put
them together, but would see "dragon" as an atom.

~~~
vorg
龙 takes up less space than "dragon" on a page or screen, though.

~~~
colanderman
You can have both. 용 in Korean spells (with three letters) "yong", means
"dragon", and fits in one box.

~~~
xiaoma
But 龍 (simplified as 龙) by itself always means dragon. 용 does nothing to
disambiguate homophones.

~~~
tokenadult
Counterexample to the statement

* 龍 (simplified as 龙) by itself always means dragon *

In the Chinese character compound 水龍頭 , which is the usual Chinese word for
"faucet," there is an etymological reason why the character 龍 is there, but a
Chinese person, just like an English-speaking person, thinks of the object as
"faucet" (one semantic unit, spoken in three syllables) rather than as "water
dragon head."

Other examples can be multiplied by anyone who has paid careful attention to
the details of the Chinese writing system. The compound 車床 (lathe) is
completely opaque to a native speaker of English, who might guess that "cart
bed" means "chassis," but would never guess that it means "lathe."

~~~
xiaoma
That's not a counter example to the point I brought up.

A counter example would be an example of 2 Korean words that are ambiguous in
regards to homophones when written in Chinese characters but non-ambiguous
when written in Hangul.

Actually I'd be very interested to see _any_ Korean, Japanese or Chinese words
that are more ambiguous when rendered with characters than phonetic
syllabaries (i.e hangul, hiragana, zhuyin...).

------
jianshen
Check out <http://www.spreeder.com/app.php?intro=1> where they take a sentence
or paragraph and "play" each word in the same spot on the screen, eliminating
the need to move your eyes.

It would be interesting to see if there are any significant differences in the
max WPM (words per minute) between English and Chinese readers under this
context where information density is no longer a function of space.

~~~
m_for_monkey
Interesting app. AFAIK it's hard to chunk Chinese text to words since they
don't use spaces (In the case of Japanese, I know for sure that perfect
automated chunking is impossible). But it's not quiet right for English, too,
because it shows short words like "a" and "it" individually, while for an
advanced reader "I have to" and "I don't think so" or even longer strings are
a single chunk.

------
Alienz
I read English (my second language since 3 yr old) and Chinese (my native
language), and I am an amateur linguist. I can tell you that Chinese is NOT A
language just as Romance is not a language. Spanish, Italian are language. But
Chinese is not. It sounds interesting, but it is the fact. You read Chinese
article from the communist China, or you read the Chinese classics like
Analects of Confucious, or you read the government documents from Taiwan, or
even the Japanese Emperor's Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War,
you see different Chinese there. The fact is, not everything written in
Chinese character is Chinese, just as not everything in Latin alphabets is
Latin. The writing style, habit on use of words and sentence structures, etc.
all matters. I can tell some characteristics about different "Chinese": The
communist Chinese, like all communist regime's literature, is lengthy and full
of unnecessary adjectives. It is annoying to read them. Interestingly, they
like to judge a book on its length, the longer the better they think. The
classic Chinese (pre-1920) is more "classical" and compact, but its use of
words are more sophisticated because these classic literatures are for the
educated, and by the educated. The taiwanese Chinese is the layman's version
of classical Chinese, looks elegant but sometimes with sophisticated
vocabularies. If you are looking for something easy to read, and concise, seek
to Singapore or Malaysia.

I am not saying which is good or which is bad, but that's the style! Whether
Chinese or English can read faster? If we put the language style aside,
obviously Chinese. That's because Chinese writing system has much higher
entropy and thus more information per square inch. However, writing style
matters, a lot.

------
darklajid
That's a fascinating topic for me, for two reasons:

1) At the local Hebrew lessons I met a minister of the embassy of South Korea.
He told me that Korean is a praised language all over the world (it was news
to me - make of it what you want) for its simplicity and therefor speed for
typists. He elaborated and said that both the layout (keyboard, I assume)
would be very sensible and every 'character' is actually a combination of
consonant-vowel-consonant and thereby simple (triplets, always) and carrying a
lot of information. Since then I'd like to learn more about this idea and
confirm or bust that claim.

2) Learning Hebrew is hard. A real quote from a coworker was "It's an easy
language! We only have 22 letters, after all". Reduce your alphabet
(alephbet?) from 26 to 22. Note that of these letters, 5 are only special
versions of other letters and replace those in the last position of the word.
Which leaves 17 letters for most words/the meat of the language. And most
words are rather short (okay, okay.. I'm not comparing to German here, that
would be pointless. Even compared to english it seems to be the same or
shorter to me).

Bottom line: I still have a bet going that I can generate Hebrew line noise
(following the rules of going with the 17 letters and adding the required
sofit/end letter if required. Gibberish ending in נ would be 'fixed' to end in
ן) and will hit word after word. On my list of possible weekend projects I
have an entry 'Hebrew or not' to crowd-source this.

~~~
edanm
"[Hebrew] only has 22 letters, after all. [...] Reduce your alphabet
(alephbet?) from 26 to 22. Note that of these letters, 5 are only special
versions of other letters and replace those in the last position of the word"

That's incorrect. All 22 letters are actually letters, the special versions of
letters for the ends of words are _not_ counted towards the full 22.

Also, I think Hebrew words tend to be shorter because they lack vowels. There
are ways to add something similar to vowels to words, by adding pronunciation
guides to each letter. These are usually _not_ included in most Hebrew
writing, but this trusts that the reader already knows how to pronounce the
word.

I'm not a linguist, so I'm not sure this vowel thing matters, but that's my
guess as to why Hebrew words are shorter.

~~~
darklajid
Ugh. Thanks for pointing out my counting mistakes. Mea culpa.

Vowels: You're right, of course. My bet originated during lunch talks. My
intuition (in other words: more stupid mistakes ahead, maybe..) says that by
leaving out the vowels and overloading letters (b or v? f or p? u, o or v?
etc. pp.) the language loses a lot of error correction margin [1] and leads to
more collisions/a denser field of 'actual words' [2].

1: That refers to the ability of taking western languages and removing all
vowels there. Or stripping out random letters etc. I'm certainly _far_ _far_
from an adapt reader here, so I'm musing about things that interest me
although I lack the required experience.

2: Which leads to my 'Hebrew or not' idea. My gut says that randomly pounding
the keyboard results a lot more often in 'real words'.

Not bashing hebrew. I even like the script by now (in the beginning hand-
written text looked especially random to me).

~~~
edanm
I hope a linguist will chime in here, it's an interesting subject and I'm
wondering if my guesses on the vowel-less nature of Hebrew are correct.

I'm not sure how much this will change your "random pounding on keyboard"
idea, but English has a _much_ larger vocabulary than Hebrew.

P.S. I see you're in Israel now, hope you're enjoying your time in Tel Aviv.

~~~
darklajid
Tel Aviv: My first winter wearing t-shirts. Cannot complain. :)

vowel-less: (I don't need to repeat the 'I suck at hebrew' disclaimer, right?)
Kind of. From what I know:

There are no explicit letters for 'a', 'e'

You can represent an 'o' or an 'u' with a ו (otherwise used as consonant,
'v'). I know for a fact that words with 'o' can be written without a 'vowel'
letter (לא for example: no). I don't know if 'u' is always represented as a
letter of it's own.

'i' is often used as 'ij' or 'ji' and teams up with 'י = j' in that case. It
can be represented without a letter just as well though.

Bottom line: Except for 'u' (no idea about that one? maybe just as well?) you
can have all vowels 'hidden' in plain sight.

Would love to have someone from IL chime in here though and correct all my
mistakes.

~~~
edanm
I'm from IL :) [1]

You're right about the י and ו replacing vowels much of the time. Inspired by
this discussion, I went and read a little more about the history of Modern
Hebrew, and stumbled on this page in Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ktiv_male>

The idea of writing vowel-like signs into the letters is called Nikkud. But
apparently, since most people don't write Nikkud, the Academy of the Hebrew
Language wrote a set of rules explaining how to exchange Nikkud for letters
that will serve as vowels. I had no idea it was so deliberate, but this
explains why there are many words which people here write differently.

I still think there is more ambiguity in Hebrew. Or, as you put it, less
"error correction margin". Even with "Ktiv Male".

[1] I lived abroad for a few years, so I wasn't in Israel from the 2nd grade
to the 7th. This means I missed a lot of the "traditional" learning process of
learning about the language, grammar, etc. So I'm a native Hebrew speaker, but
I have some gaps in my knowledge about the correct way to do things, etc.

------
imrehg
Well, looking at my friends here in Taiwan, empirically I can say that they
read books in Chinese much faster than I do it in English (which is not my
native language, but been using it as primary language for more than 8 years
now).

One important thing can affect this, though, that many texts can become much
more simple (ie. shorter) when translated to Chinese, since that language
doesn't have many of the complicated (but also very expressive) grammatical
structures of other languages.

~~~
eddy_chan
While each Chinese character is 'denser' than an English alphabetical letter
the analogy that should be drawn is that one Chinese character is closer in
equivalence to a whole English word and whenever Chinese characters are strung
together to create compound words they are recognized by the native Chinese
reader as logographs themselves.

Native speakers of English don't phonetically sound out words they read. We
recognize whole words, I remember reading a Cambridge study on this years ago,
here's the best link I could find <http://www.mrc-
cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/>

You can print more Chinese characters than English words to a page, if you
read emails in Chinese they're often much much shorter but I'd say it takes
native readers of both languages roughly the same amount of time to comprehend
2 equivalent passages. Mind you I said 'comprehend' and not read out aloud to
control for differences in the rate of speech for both languages.

------
autarch
One of the things I've noticed with my very limited knowledge of Chinese is
that it's a fantastic language for poetic expression. Each Chinese character
is a single syllable, so you can have a poem that consists of 4 lines, each
with 6 syllables, and convey a huge amount of meaning.

In a language like English, 6 syllables won't get you nearly as much meaning.

I've noticed that Chinese pop music seems to have much more expressive, poetic
lyrics, even in stuff aimed at a mass audience. A good example is Faye Wong's
song "Sky". For a puff pop song the lyrics are quite poetic when translated
into English. It's hard to think of an equivalently poetic English language
song aimed at such a large audience.

~~~
cleaver
I'd add that the composition of Chinese characters makes possible poetic
structures that are impossible in other languages. A famous poem by Tang
dynasty poet Li Bai:

床前明月光 疑是地上霜。 舉頭望明月， 低頭思故鄉。

(Apologies if you can't see the characters on your system.) The key radical
"月" (moon) repeats itself as a character on its own and also as a radical
making up other characters. Thus, Chinese poems can have a measure of visual
resonance as well as audible.

A sad fact is that the PRC government altered the written language to make it
easier to learn writing and a lot of this subtle beauty was lost. Today, kids
learn to type on a computer phonetically, so the complexity of the traditional
characters is no longer an issue.

~~~
Jun8
Great example! Here are ~40 translations of his "Drinking Alone with the Moon"
poem, one of my personal favorites:
[http://clatterymachinery.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/li-bai-
dri...](http://clatterymachinery.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/li-bai-drinking-
alone-with-the-moon-his-shadow-32-translators/). The image of the moon and
loneliness always reminds me of a well-known fragment of Sappho:
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/usappho/sph49.htm>. About 1400 years and
thousands of miles apart, yet resonating with the same emotion.

On the funnier side, the famous _Lion-Eating Poet_ must be mentioned:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den). Hilarious and beautiful example of constrained
writing.

------
harbud
Off topic: I started learning Chinese a few years ago when I was already an
adult, and my Chinese reading speed is still stuck below 150 WPM, while my
English, also non-native language, is around 500 WPM. Any tip to increase it?
Recently tried flash reading exercises like the aforementioned spreeder.com,
seems to help a bit.

~~~
gcao
IMHO, the best way to improve reading speed is to read more and more. Once you
know more words and can tell their meanings in shorter time, you read faster.
There is a chinese idiom for it: 熟能生巧

~~~
harbud
Thanks! Although over time I've also come to accept that I will never be near
as fast as the natives (or people who learn to read from when they were a
child).

------
nodata
Number of words in the vocabulary is also important for nuance: English has
loads more words than any other language.

------
cleaver
While not the same thing as reading, I have noticed that Chinese is quicker to
scan for a phrase you're looking for. I'm a native English speaker and have
learned to read a bit of Chinese. I'm at the level where I can interpret some
signs, but far from being able to read a newspaper.

Where I notice this is on a bilingual Chinese/English menu. If there's a
particular dish I want, I find it is far quicker to find the Chinese
characters.

It was mentioned that English readers will read words (like "dragon") as an
atom, rather than letter by letter. In that case, the Chinese character is
more unique and recognizable. I suspect that there is more variety in the
shape of Chinese characters making them quicker to recognize and scan quickly.

------
xster
" This means someone reading Chinese must dig into the structure of each
character to decipher its meaning."...

A pineapple is a lot harder to draw than a banana, but it doesn't make it
harder to recognize

------
stupandaus
One big problem with this analysis is that the information conveyed per word
cannot be compared exactly like this. The Chinese language as a whole is very
idiomatic, and often 'words' are combinations of 2-4 characters. Analysis on a
per character basis doesn't make much sense. What really should be analyzed is
an 'Ideas per Minute.' Perhaps the best way would be to have parties from both
languages who are fluent in a 3rd language try to summarize a passage in the
3rd language as succinctly as possible into Chinese and English respectively
and see which language is more efficient in this manner.

While the post does note that he is in Taiwan, I suspect that there are large
differences in reading speed between Traditional Chinese and Simplified
Chinese for a few reasons:

1\. Simplified Chinese has less information density per character

2\. Simplified Chinese combines more character and uses less characters
overall

3\. Traditional Chinese uses more 'old-fashioned' vocabulary and idioms which
are nearly gone from the Mainland Chinese vernacular

Really my only complaint here is that he should specify that he is talking
about Traditional Chinese.

~~~
wangweij
None of the three reasons you said is correct. Yes, a Simplified Chinese
character contains less strokes than a Traditional one, but they convey almost
the exact same quantity of information. You will understand this when you
notice that although people in (Mainland) China and Taiwan wrote differently,
they speak almost the same, using the same number of characters to express the
same meaning.

On the other hand, there is a difference between Classical (Literary) Chinese
and modern plain speech Chinese. The Classical Chinese, used in ancient times
mainly for writing purposes, with its different grammar and vocabulary, does
use less characters.

~~~
stupandaus
1\. They do not convey the same amount of information. Take 发 for example.
This is now a split tone word which can mean either 發 or 髮. The information
density has been reduced and it's now ambiguous without context which
character this represents.

2\. People in Mainland China and Taiwan most certainly do not speak the same.
There are a litany of spoken differences between 普通話 and 國語. As someone who
travels frequently between the two countries, I am constantly shocked how much
the two have deviated. There are numerous idioms that are completely unused on
either side. Many very basic terms such as the terms for SMS (短信 in China, 簡訊
in Taiwan) are completely unrecognized outside of the respective areas.

------
sethg
Similarly, an American Sign Language sign takes longer to articulate than an
English word (because signing uses larger, slower muscles than speech), but to
compensate, a great deal of ASL grammar is carried by facial expression,
posture, rhythm, etc., so the actual rate of communication is the same.

------
praptak
Both languages read at similar "words per minute" speeds but it might be that
one of them can express the same meaning in less words. This would make it
faster in practice.

------
vacri
IANALinguist, but it seems to me that the chinese and english versions of
'dragon' are equally complex. Sure, the chinese character takes less width,
but it takes 16 strokes (being generous). 'dragon' takes 11 strokes if you're
being really harsh. My gut feeling is that while the english word is wider,
it's of similar complexity to the chinese word. Gut feelings don't make good
science, though :)

~~~
awolf
Reading a Chinese character means decomposing its sub-parts into sub-meanings.
It's not that there are 9 or 10 strokes in the character for dragon that make
it complex to read, it's that the outer 4 strokes might signify "beast", the
inner strokes "fire", and the cross strokes "immortal".

(Note: I don't actually know how to read this character this is just an
illustration)

------
nvictor
> The answer is neither.

no need to thank me :)

