[sirn]

Japanese and Chinese in particular can compress a lot more meaning in a byte than many other languages[1]. I pick up a random article at Nikkei.com[2] and calculate number of bytes of the first paragraph, and it's only 449 bytes in UTF-8[3]. Chinese is even more efficient at this, as you can basically fit the whole news in a Tweet.

[1]: Idiomatic Yojijukugo 四字熟語 is an extreme example for this, but there's non-idiom Yojijukugo too, e.g. 日米関係 is a 12 bytes word that translates to "United States-Japan relations"

[2]: https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO46571150V20C19A6000000/

[3]: It describes how people are walking around the park in Chicago on Jun 13 to catch a rare Pokemon with a one line interview of a son of Mr. Stuart from California.

(I speak three languages: Thai, English, Japanese)

[KirinDave]

This is fair, I should have thought more about the list.

For Japanese, I don't think the way people talk casually to one another is as amenable to compression as newspaper headlines

But surely for Thai you're in a sub-optimal boat?

[sirn]

This is completely anecdotal, but I have an alternative Twitter account where I interact with Japanese people I know, and I rarely hit the 140 characters limit except when I’m in a heated debate (or when I’m VERY excited about something).

For Thai, yeah, this one is a little more complicated. I’ve commented about this in sibling thread.

[KirinDave]

I tried to rig up a Shavian chat group and we just hit the wall over and over. It was frustrating so we moved to Matrix.