[imrehg]

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.

[eddy_chan]

While each Chinese character is 'denser' than an English alphabetical letter the analogy that should be drawn is that one Chinese character is closer in equivalence to a whole English word and whenever Chinese characters are strung together to create compound words they are recognized by the native Chinese reader as logographs themselves.

Native speakers of English don't phonetically sound out words they read. We recognize whole words, I remember reading a Cambridge study on this years ago, here's the best link I could find http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

You can print more Chinese characters than English words to a page, if you read emails in Chinese they're often much much shorter but I'd say it takes native readers of both languages roughly the same amount of time to comprehend 2 equivalent passages. Mind you I said 'comprehend' and not read out aloud to control for differences in the rate of speech for both languages.