[labster]

[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix -tion. That's what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7?

Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.

[gfaure]

That is a part of the analogy which definitely applies -- Chinese script (even Simplified) often completely ignores Huffman coding-like principles. Otherwise we wouldn't have words like 繼續 "continue" (41 strokes).

[dou4cc]

People like you looking for less strokes in China mix both English and 中文 words in a passage, which is silly in my opinion.

[yorwba]

For comparison, the letters in "continue" have approximately 15 strokes total.

[pacaro]

Or two strokes and a dot in cursive. A principle that also applies in Chinese and Japanese

[labster]

続く is 14 strokes, so Japanese beats English!

I could go on ... and "go on" is only 6 strokes.

[vacri]

You could just use the ellipsis, and use only three strokes. Or even simpler, an em-dash at one stroke. :)

[leemailll]

继续 21 strokes jixu 8 strokes

[vorg]

继续 is 21 strokes when printed, but less when foreigners in China like me write them when we handwrite them quickly.

继 is 5 strokes handwritten (纟,䒑,丨,八,乚 each written in one stroke) and 续 is 4 (纟,十over乛,氵,人 each as one stroke), so that's 9 altogether.

Mainland Chinese who learn handwriting at school have a way of writing each character with only one or two strokes.

[vacri]

If you're only counting pen-down-pen up as a single stroke regardless of smooth movement, then any cursive word in any latin-based alphabet is a single stroke, unless it has an 'i/j' or some sort of diacritic in it (some people cross 't' in their cursive, some people do it separately).

[dTal]

>sitting on his Vannevar.

Took me a minute and some Googling. Did you just make that up? It's in perfect spirit.

[labster]

Yeah, that's my original rhyming slang. Thought of it about a year ago. But as is usual for jokes, sometimes you have to wait for years to find the perfect time and audience to use it.