
Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages - fogus
http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/japanese-conveys-information-more.html
======
muyuu
Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-
syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the
highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs
saying and most can be inferred.

Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of
what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across.

Now, drawing any comparisons is extremely hard because context doesn't
translate, so by definition you cannot create a benchmark. For instance, they
convey far more information about social nuance and politeness, to levels that
would need whole paragraphs per sentence to explain.

Also, syllables are a horrible benchmark for Japanese since all their
syllables are extremely short and quick to pronounce. Their encoding, so to
speak, consists of a smaller unit size and a bigger number of units. They have
a compression system for text, which is the mixture of kanji and kana.

This basically goes to show how unique Japanese is in many respects and how
differently they communicate.

~~~
mc32
Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and
Romaji are about writing.

I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the
written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1]
were borrowings made to fit the spoken language.

[1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I
mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had
not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like
Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in
Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was
another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain,
they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they
became phonographs.

~~~
muyuu
Your understanding is quite wrong, frankly... I wouldn't even know where to
start, but I'll just drop that obviously homophones are not written with the
same characters...

Kanji were fitted upon Japanese as much as they were upon Chinese. Kanji is a
writing system that doesn't depend on phonetics in any way, the correspondence
is one-way only.

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ineedtosleep
I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study
source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more
about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language.

In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a
few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for
this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo."
literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or
subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us)
go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over
there."

There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese.
Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to
"I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of
the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence
structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would
yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables,
respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4
syllables].

I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on
Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this.

[1] [http://ohll.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...](http://ohll.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-
subject_language#Japanese...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-
subject_language#Japanese_language)

~~~
batista
> _In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University_

Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just
taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less
insight on the language...

~~~
ineedtosleep
Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied
linguistics.

Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order
or magnitude less insight on the language..."?

If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be
argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably
convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context --
it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can
potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English
requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object:
I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb).

The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant
difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English
in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar
syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure
(again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and
will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So
translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of
work and produce more extraneous words.

~~~
batista
_> Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied
linguistics._

OK, that sounds qualified enought ;-)

 _> Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an
order or magnitude less insight on the language..."?_

Oh, just asking about your involvement with Japanese, if it was just some
foreign language class at uni (that almost everybody forgets much about later)
or a major.

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AgathaTheWitch
It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were
to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you
would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language
is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was
angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed
but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom).

Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in
English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information.
Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways
to say this in Japanese.

A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between
9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of
information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead
of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of
relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which
could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite.

In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about
their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast
requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and
word connotations.

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shadowmint
It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable:

"The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus
(Campione & Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20
texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following
languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE),
Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each
text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a
narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)."

Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content),
translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density
based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the
information (read) by various native speakers.

The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of
information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data
complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends
to be spoker more slowly).

This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies.

To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower
information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked
segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find
japanese right up there.

That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends
up sounding unsubstanciated.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
>comparable semantic content

Hmm. Would this mean specifying similar amounts of context? Japanese from the
little I know, at least when spoken, omits a lot of details that can be
inferred from the context. I would imagine casual speech to be far more
efficient than polite formal writing, which includes many details that would
otherwise be left out and uses the longer "polite" verb forms.

------
Symmetry
_maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken._

From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case.
Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a
sentence when it can be inferred from context.

~~~
gommm
Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to
be guessed by the context...

Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number
of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not
possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good).
I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the
field confirm me that it was the case (not to sure of the details but that was
during a discussion on voice compression).

~~~
Tipzntrix
Maybe this explains why Hatsune Miku can perform live shows for millions
around the world while people still have trouble taking Microsoft Sam and Anna
seriously.

~~~
lmm
I suspect that's more about Japanese celebrity dynamics; consider Naomi
Campbell's famous statement on her album sales.

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chao-
Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language,
respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some
examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been
thus:

Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much.
The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other
person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds
like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice.

Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need
to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all
of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on,
but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash
of ambiguity can provide some added politeness.

Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness.
Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a
combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and
such doesn't feel so slow when spoken.

Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the
study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't
the whole picture.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a
(mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and
把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex
and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual
abbreviations.

~~~
vorg
> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective

I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other
day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go
along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some
words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic
idea can get you very far.".

~~~
evincarofautumn
That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment.
(I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.)

“他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In
the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does
before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a
prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatically as a topic. In
other words, #1 = subject + prepositional phrase + predicate adjective; #2 =
topic(al prepositional phrase) + subject + predicate adjective.

I mean, the claim’s not _untrue_ —throwing words around can definitely get you
farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of
arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just
try to use correct grammar, because it _is_ simple.

~~~
vorg
Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker
learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-
front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not
clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of
speech.

> throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is
> simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure
> with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct
> grammar

I'd argue pauses, like tones and stress and other "prosodic features", have
just an important place as grammar in natural languages.

And... not sure if you're a programmer (this IS Hacker News after all) but...
computer languages could also use an equivalent of pauses, stresses, and tones
alongside grammar to communicate semantics to the computer and/or other
readers. If whitespace and newlines is like pauses then Python uses a
combination of pauses (i.e whitespace) and grammar to communicate semantics.

~~~
evincarofautumn
I’m not a native Chinese speaker. I’ve been studying it at college for about
two years, so probably around 300 class hours. I am a programmer,
though—that’s probably an understatement. I agree that whitespace is like
“silence” in a way. But programming has much more in common with written
language than spoken—and as much in common with mathematics as prose—so not
everything matches up directly.

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coob
It's also subject to poor interpretation:

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-
translation_...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-
translation_shortfilms)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I cringed, poor director...

~~~
mc32
I cringed for the actor. It's like he's lost among this sea of conversation
and only gets a few crumbs. Like grasping at straws of understanding.

------
AznHisoka
When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without
actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne...
"

~~~
patio11
Really? Is that so? Umm, erm, well, how do I put it, English... ya know what I
mean.

We had an exercise once in Japanese class for who could go longest on
hesitation noises without including substantial content. I remember losing at
only 46 seconds. This is not a Japanese exercise, this is a _fluency_
exercise. All languages have a right way to say nothing because nothing is
often the right thing to say.

P.S. There are very fluent and fluid ways to say absolutely nothing of
substance in both English and Japanese. Try playing the improv game "Talk like
a politician": given an accusation of a true statement ("You had a banana for
lunch"), dispute the charge without actually saying that you did not have a
banana for lunch. You can use arbitrarily sophisticated English (or Japanese)
for this.

~~~
WildUtah
"Nothing is often the right thing to do an always a clever thing to say."
-Will Durant

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rubashov
I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most
languages.

Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly
hard.

~~~
iron_ball
Those three words are composed of Greco-Roman bases. Is English unique in
having so many words like that? (And does anyone know the linguistic term for
words made by "mixing and matching" existing roots and affixes?)

~~~
silentbicycle
Agglutination.

~~~
andreasvc
Agglutination is a specific kind of word formation where roots are
concatenated unmodified; it happens in Turkish, some Inuit languages, and
Esperanto. More generally the process of word formation is called morphology.

------
KoulMomo
This explains every Final Fantasy game ever made.

