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Which reads faster, Chinese or English?

by nameless_noob on 12/22/11, 7:13 AM with 83 comments

• by tokenadult on 12/22/11, 1:08 PM

  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.

• by frobozz on 12/22/11, 9:45 AM

  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.

• by jianshen on 12/22/11, 10:08 AM

  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.

• by Alienz on 12/22/11, 6:13 PM

  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.

• by darklajid on 12/22/11, 11:40 AM

  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.

• by imrehg on 12/22/11, 8:56 AM

  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.

• by autarch on 12/22/11, 4:47 PM

  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.

• by harbud on 12/22/11, 10:58 AM

  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.

• by nodata on 12/22/11, 9:57 AM

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

• by cleaver on 12/22/11, 5:16 PM

  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.

• by xster on 12/22/11, 3:04 PM

  " 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

• by stupandaus on 12/22/11, 2:01 PM

  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.

• by sethg on 12/22/11, 4:56 PM

  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.

• by praptak on 12/22/11, 10:52 AM

  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.

• by vacri on 12/22/11, 11:26 AM

  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 :)

• by nvictor on 12/22/11, 10:19 AM

  > The answer is neither.

  no need to thank me :)