Which reads faster, Chinese or English?

http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or-english/

by nameless_noob • 15 years ago

94 83 15 years ago

imrehg• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

frobozz2• 15 years ago

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.

muyuu6• 15 years ago

It's still faster to recognise it in a language like Chinese/Japanese though.

For instance, I see your nick and I can remember you from TechReport many years ago. But if it was in Chinese the match would be faster, and especially so if it appeared surrounded by other text (alphabet-based text looks more self-similar).

ebzlo• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm Chinese-American (can read both).

The example he gave is not a good one. I instantly recognized both words because the Chinese word for dragon is a single character and in English, words are separated by spaces.

Often times, words in Chinese are made up of 2 or 3 characters, or even 4.

Take for example this word [set?]

可口可樂

This means Coca-Cola in Chinese. In an English sentence, Coca-Cola is unmistakable as it's a word surrounded by spaces. In Chinese, we don't use spaces, we must decide for ourselves when words start and words end.

Furthermore, 可口 means thirsty. So it wouldn't be until I got to the third character that I would know I'm not reading thirsty (though more realistically context should have defined it for me already).

I find Chinese sentences involve much fewer syllables than English though, so perhaps there is some merit to that.

vorg• 15 years ago

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

justincormack• 15 years ago

Limited by the resolution to some extent though. Hi-res screens help a lot. With realistic text sizes on low res screens there is much less in it.

colanderman• 15 years ago

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

yaix• 15 years ago

With the advantage of phonetic languages, that you can read new words that you have never seen before. Impossible in Chinese. (Probably the reason that everybody but China has made the switch from symbolic to phonetic at some point in the past few milenia).

cglee3• 15 years ago

Have you heard of "radicals"? You can guess what a Chinese character means without being able to pronounce it.

nodata• 15 years ago

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

jianshen• 15 years ago

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.

corin_• 15 years ago

Thanks for the link, that site came to mind when I was reading the article but I couldn't think what it was called.

davedx• 15 years ago

Really interesting app! So it's possible to read up to 1000 wpm using that, pretty incredible. I guess an implication there is that we should in theory be able to 'produce' a lot more wpm, using better tools than a keyboard. Do you know of any research in that area?

m_for_monkey• 15 years ago

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.

nvictor• 15 years ago

> The answer is neither.

no need to thank me :)

praptak• 15 years ago

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.

harbud2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

harbud2• 15 years ago

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).

vacri• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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)

darklajid3• 15 years ago

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.

edanm3• 15 years ago

"[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.

darklajid3• 15 years ago

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).

MichaelGG• 15 years ago

I learned a bit of Korean script and could touch type in it on a US keyboard. It's a fairly nice system, although there seems to be a fair bit of non-rational pride in it, too. Woe to anyone that points out any similarities to previous writing systems...

But it's not just triplets. You can have 2, 3, or 4 components per character (Wikipedia says 5, but I'm not sure how that works). The first component must be a consonant, but there's a null consonant too, allowing you to create syllables with just a vowel sound.

I don't see how the writing system itself helps typists. If words are shorter, that's a function of shorter words, not the writing system. A syllable still requires several keystrokes each.

That said, it's very simple to learn. I learned it in a week. But, I also learned the Japanese scripts (hiragana/katakana) in a week as well using James Heisig's awesome book[1]. So, perhaps learning alphabet scripts is just not an overly difficult task in general?

1: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Hiragana-James-Heisig...

eridius• 15 years ago

From what I understand, the Korean written language was pretty much invented wholesale by one man (the king at the time, I believe). As such it's a lot better designed and internally consistent then other written languages (which accumulated naturally over time).

That said, while it may be easier to learn, I imagine people still read it at about the same speed they would read English or Chinese. I don't remember where but a while back I read an article saying that basically all spoken languages impart information at roughly the same rate (e.g. languages with higher information density are spoken slower, languages with lower information density are spoken faster). And from the OP's article it sounds like this applies to written languages as well.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

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...

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.

donw• 15 years ago

I'm interested in reading the articles, but $200 to get ahold of them in an out-of-print-book is a bit steep.

Any other sources that you could recommend by chance?

Jun83• 15 years ago

The book's not out of print, here's the link to OUP: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/?v.... You can get it used from Amazon or wait until OUP has their seasonal sales, which happened 3-4 times a year. I bought my copy at one of these sales for around $60.

This is an excellent, authoritative resource on the subject.

blacksmythe2• 15 years ago

  >> 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.

dextorious3• 15 years ago

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.

mkr-hn2• 15 years ago

I have a friend who took a course in Japanese, went to Japan, then mistook a hospital for a train station. He documented the whole experience, and you could watch as he went from American university fluent to real world fluent. Seeing the difference between school and the real world so clearly helped me get the most out of my two years of community college.

pradocchia2• 15 years ago

Aha! "The World's Writing Systems" looks suspiciously like another book I have, "Grammatology" (not the one by Derrida). Published in the 90s and similarly priced, but out of print as far as I know.

Who wrote the chapter on Chinese?

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

Who wrote the chapter on Chinese [in The World's Writing Systems]?

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/?v...

I'm pretty sure it's by William G. Boaltz

http://depts.washington.edu/asianll/people/faculty/boltzwm.h...

whose papers about ancient Chinese are full of surprising details, with insight into how the current writing system developed historically.

stupandaus2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

stupandaus2• 15 years ago

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.

xster• 15 years ago

" 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

autarch2• 15 years ago

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.

cleaver3• 15 years ago

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.

autarch2• 15 years ago

You could probably do something similar in English by using words that incorporate smaller words - "the sum of summer" or something like that.

I'm sure there must be examples of poems that do exactly that.

Jun83• 15 years ago

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.... 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.... Hilarious and beautiful example of constrained writing.

Jun83• 15 years ago

You bring up a very interesting point. In addition to the syllable feature you mention the fact that Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) lacks many grammatical features (e.g. past tense) creates a timeless quality, praised by many translators to English.

sethg• 15 years ago

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.

cleaver3• 15 years ago

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.

Alienz• 15 years ago

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.

Which reads faster, Chinese or English?

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