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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

As an English native speaker who learned Mandarin, I really didn't find the lack of spaces harmful to learning the language.

Since each character represents a syllable, rather than a specific sound, and the written language is essentially not phonetic, reading the characters is an entirely different experience.

OTOH, you have English and German and others that frequently use compound words, and the use of spaces becomes really important to understanding the writing.

I have zero experience with Thai.

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> OTOH, you have English and German and others that frequently use compound words, and the use of spaces becomes really important to understanding the writing.

Schleifmaschinenverleih would like to have a word with you.

This is parsed as Schleif-Maschinen-Verleih. Verleih means a rental company. The middle one is machine, and the first one I find both sanding and whetting as translations, not sure which one it is. So you can rent sanding and/or whetting machines there.

There are cases where it's ambiguous but for the most part the lack of spaces in compound nouns in German is not an issue.

A somewhat infamous example is Rohrohrzucker which should be parsed as Roh-Rohr-Zucker (raw cane sugar), but Rohr-Ohr-Zucker is also possible (pipe ear sugar). It's pretty clear when it happens that you got the wrong parsing but it takes a while to figure out what the right parsing is :-)

As far as speaking is concerned: I guess the extra spaces in English don't necessarily translate to pauses, do they? Is plugin pronounced differently from plug-in due to the hyphen?

To clarify, I'm not saying that compound words are difficult to parse due to a lack of spaces. I'm saying that without any spaces in a sentence at all, it's harder to differentiate between compound and non-compound words.

blueberry vs. blue berry

stand up vs. standup

online vs. on line (northeast US term for queueing)

cartwheel vs. cart wheel

Stick compound words in a sentence that doesn't have any spaces at all, and you either have to pause to grok context, or context won't even help you (blue berry vs blueberry). At least German capitalizes all of its nouns, which would certainly help.

Compare this with Chinese, Korean, Japanese or other similar languages that don't use spaces at all (except perhaps after punctuation).

> As an English native speaker who learned Mandarin, I really didn't find the lack of spaces harmful to learning the language.

Definitely. The logograms and being in a completely different language family are the real hurdles.

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