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Comment by mchaver | Hacker News Reader

The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.

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I’m not sure how much evidence there is for that either — a Chinese friend couldn’t believe that I could just look at a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it was about; she, despite her fluency in written English, thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid comprehension.

It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute pain at first, then very comfortable.

I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.

Yeah. That was pretty much my point — no native speaker is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how Chinese speakers aren’t looking at each stroke.

Much like in English you can pull out lots of vowels and still read the text, you can cover up the about bottom 40% of the characters in a sentence and still read it.

> information density of writing

I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.

I was reading a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.:

  收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字.

was translated into

  He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed them in the palace. He unified the law, weights and measurements, standardized the axle width of carriages, and standardized the writing system.

I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters.

For example,

"去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket".

3 syllables vs 7 syllables.

To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are mini-words unto themselves.

Don't forget all the abbreviation. "超市", supermarket, is abbreviated from "超級", super, and "市場", market. The equivalent in English would be "sup-mark" or something along those lines. (Or in Japanese, just "super".)

Since we're now talking about verbal rather than written:

> No matter how fast or slow, how simple or complex, each language gravitated toward an average rate of 39.15 bits per second, they report today in Science Advances.

-- https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

This tracks - it's difficult to speak at the same pace in Chinese as I can English. That said - are those 39.15 bits plaintext? Compressed? Encrypted?

The size of a word does not correlate with it's concept - I still posit that some languages can transfer concepts faster than others, minus our baud rate.

Edit: Or, perhaps I am not as gifted an English speaker as my bias has presumed :| For example, I had to lookup "syntagmatic".

Actually “去” is pronounced “Qù”

Thank you

I don't speak Chinese, but my understanding is that it's not a totally fair comparison: classical Chinese text was often highly abbreviated, to such a degree that you have to be an expert historian to interpret it correctly.

For example, the characters comprising your example text starts like:

collect (收) [from] [all] soldiers (兵) under the sky (天下), gather (聚) at(?) (之) Xianyang (咸陽), melt (銷) and (以) become(?) (為) bell-stand (鍾鐻) metal (金) person (人) twelve (十二) ...

As you can see, the English "translation" is more like an annotated translation. E.g., the original doesn't say who did it, or what he collected from soldiers: we just inferred "weapon" because what else could be melted into statues?

Similarly, "standardized the axle width of carriages" is just: cart (車) same (同) axle width (軌). We're supposed to infer "standardized" because we are talking about the Emperor's deeds.

Classical Chinese (Ancient or Old Chinese – multiple terms are used), the language the quote was written in that predates Middle Chinese and, by extension all modern Chinese languages, had a very different grammar with many features of it having all but disappeared from all Chinese languages. Classical Chinese texts are incomprehensible to a modern Chinese person who has not invested sufficient amounts of time and effort into completing Classical Chinese studies first.

There is a book, «Classical Chinese for everyone: a guide for absolute beginners» by Bryan W. van Norden that is easy to read and gives a gentle introduction into Classical Chinese.

The old grammar and vocabulary coupled with the Chinese style of writing metaphorically with an abundant application of allusions and with the same Chinese characters having multiple unrelated meanings, makes Ancient Chinese texts very terse and notoriously difficult to understand even for the educated Chinese people.

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