[frobozz]

All written languages are essentially logographic in the eyes of a literate user of the language.

Given his "dragon" example, A literate native speaker of English, who is familiar with the word "dragon" would not read "d. r. a. g. o. n.", then put them together, but would see "dragon" as an atom.

[vorg]

龙 takes up less space than "dragon" on a page or screen, though.

[colanderman]

You can have both. 용 in Korean spells (with three letters) "yong", means "dragon", and fits in one box.

[xiaoma]

But 龍 (simplified as 龙) by itself always means dragon. 용 does nothing to disambiguate homophones.

[tokenadult]

Counterexample to the statement

* 龍 (simplified as 龙) by itself always means dragon *

In the Chinese character compound 水龍頭 , which is the usual Chinese word for "faucet," there is an etymological reason why the character 龍 is there, but a Chinese person, just like an English-speaking person, thinks of the object as "faucet" (one semantic unit, spoken in three syllables) rather than as "water dragon head."

Other examples can be multiplied by anyone who has paid careful attention to the details of the Chinese writing system. The compound 車床 (lathe) is completely opaque to a native speaker of English, who might guess that "cart bed" means "chassis," but would never guess that it means "lathe."

[xiaoma]

That's not a counter example to the point I brought up.

A counter example would be an example of 2 Korean words that are ambiguous in regards to homophones when written in Chinese characters but non-ambiguous when written in Hangul.

Actually I'd be very interested to see any Korean, Japanese or Chinese words that are more ambiguous when rendered with characters than phonetic syllabaries (i.e hangul, hiragana, zhuyin...).

[jinushaun]

The beauty of hangul: the benefits of a phonetic alphabet system with the compactness of a logographic writing system.

[justincormack]

Limited by the resolution to some extent though. Hi-res screens help a lot. With realistic text sizes on low res screens there is much less in it.

[muyuu]

It's still faster to recognise it in a language like Chinese/Japanese though.

For instance, I see your nick and I can remember you from TechReport many years ago. But if it was in Chinese the match would be faster, and especially so if it appeared surrounded by other text (alphabet-based text looks more self-similar).

[ebzlo]

Disclaimer: I'm Chinese-American (can read both).

The example he gave is not a good one. I instantly recognized both words because the Chinese word for dragon is a single character and in English, words are separated by spaces.

Often times, words in Chinese are made up of 2 or 3 characters, or even 4.

Take for example this word [set?]

可口可樂

This means Coca-Cola in Chinese. In an English sentence, Coca-Cola is unmistakable as it's a word surrounded by spaces. In Chinese, we don't use spaces, we must decide for ourselves when words start and words end.

Furthermore, 可口 means thirsty. So it wouldn't be until I got to the third character that I would know I'm not reading thirsty (though more realistically context should have defined it for me already).

I find Chinese sentences involve much fewer syllables than English though, so perhaps there is some merit to that.

[muyuu]

I read Chinese and Japanese. None natively, and I can read Japanese faster than my own native language. I can attest without the shadow of a doubt that native Japanese and Chinese speakers read way faster than native English speakers (or native French, Spanish or Russian speakers). There may be outliers, of course. Whether this is a matter of literacy level or inherent to the language could be debated, I guess. But the difference is substantial enough for me to think it's more than literacy.

I do agree that the example given is not good, though.

I find Japanese extremely good for visual text scanning. You can look for a particular character and find it at ease. Semantically unimportant text (grammar) is usually hiragana (visually very different) and loan words are usually katakana (also visually very different). There is usually a space after the main subject (in the form of the punctuation mark 、 - not really a comma and doesn't work the same way either）.

I can scan through text in Japanese considerably faster now that I can in my own mother tongue. From my point of view that's pretty definitive. My Chinese is still lower intermediate but I can see how my Chinese and Taiwanese friends read and they aren't any slower than Japanese.

[Locke1689]

I wish people would stop citing their own anecdotal experiences as data. The article clearly states that studies have not supported your assertion that native Chinese speakers read faster than native English speakers or vice versa. If you have a contradictory study then cite that, but stop making anecdotal claims.

[muyuu]

It's funny that I got more downvotes when I'm posting about basically my day job.

It's actually self-evident for anyone who knows both languages that Chinese is semantically more dense than English and by that effect alone it's much faster to read (it takes fewer words to express the same thing, generally speaking).

I could point you to many studies to this effect but I think it's beside the point. I think the point the author is trying to make is that Chinese is faster to "scan" than English. This is harder to prove, but from my own experience I think so. As a matter of fact I do scan Chinese characters in text faster than words in my own mother tongue, and I've been reading Japanese for about just 13 years and Chinese for about 4 years (I'm in my 30s).

[Someone]

"It's actually self-evident for anyone who knows both languages that Chinese is semantically more dense than English and by that effect alone it's much faster to read"

By the same token, it is self-evident that English text, gzipped, then base-64 encoded, being denser, will be much faster to read than bare English. Because of that, I do not think that argument has much value.

On the other hand, contracted Braille is more complex than uncontracted Braille, but reading speed _in_cells_per_second_ seems to be about equal for both (http://faculty.sfasu.edu/mercerdixie/spe520/uncon_vs_cont_br...). That makes reading contracted Braille about 30% faster than reading uncontracted Braille (http://vision.psych.umn.edu/groups/gellab/Legge99.pdf)

So, I do not rule out that something similar applies to Chinese vs English.

[frobozz]

I wouldn't consider the jump from 382 to 386 words per minute to be "way faster". That said, in a periphrastic language like English, those 382 words convey less meaning.

[muyuu]

Typically the same article originally written in Japanese is read in about 60% of the time than the translated version is read by a native speaker.

It's probably not so much when the original is not Japanese written by a native-level speaker, because the semantic density is usually lower.

Measuring word count would give you a completely different idea. It must also be noted that you don't usually read every single word in Asian languages since often whole sentences are short enough to recognise their whole shape. This happens in all languages but in ideograph based ones sentences take a lot less space in readable form (although they may take about as much if not more pen strokes).

[li-ch]

Sorry for being a Chinese grammar nazi, but "可口" (ke kou) means tasty, and "口渴" (kou ke) means thirsty.

[jaredmck]

Why are the symbols for "ke" different depending on the order in which the syllables appear?

[sapphirecat]

Not sure if serious, but consider English "to", "too", and "two".

Disclaimer/explanation: I actually studied Japanese, but I'm assuming the same principle applies. If so, the symbols would be different because of the differing meanings, and the pronunciation is coincidental.

[xiaomai]

可 means "able to" (so 可口 could be sort of literally translated as "mouth-able"), whereas 渴 actually means thirsty ("mouth thirsty").

[AllenKids]

可口 means tasty though.

Your example is not very good either, because 可口可樂 is an intentional translation aimed to invoke positive association by using existing words, it could totally go by sound and be 考卡考樂.

Similar effect can be achieved translating Chinese to English too, there are plenty spelling confusions for Chinese family names such as Wang, Dang etc.

[yaix]

With the advantage of phonetic languages, that you can read new words that you have never seen before. Impossible in Chinese. (Probably the reason that everybody but China has made the switch from symbolic to phonetic at some point in the past few milenia).

[cglee]

Have you heard of "radicals"? You can guess what a Chinese character means without being able to pronounce it.

[CWuestefeld]

I have heard this claim. But in practice, with real Chinese people trying to read an unfamiliar character, I've never seen it actually work.

In English, we'd try to break out prefixes and suffixes, and come up with "some kind of disease", or "something to do with the heart". But in my experience watching Chinese people, unfamiliar characters just get a "dunno".

Could it be that the difference I'm seeing is because of the use of simplified characters rather than traditional? Maybe simplified characters have cleaned out some of the clues.

[pradocchia]

No, that's right. The best you can hope for is that you recognize the phonetic (typically the right or lower element of the graph), and match it to a word you already know from context. At best the radical is just a hint, a way to distinguish between multiple uses of the same phonetic character.

[cleaver]

One other thing is that the character gives no clue as to intonation. (EG. "ma" can be "mother", "horse", "to scold" or other meanings depending on the tone.)

[CWuestefeld]

That's OK. My voice gives no clue as to intonation, either. This is extraordinarily difficult for westerners to master (or to even hear at conversational tempo, in my opinion).

[ced]

You're a native speaker, right? Can you really see a new character and be confident about your guess? I usually think "This is probably a Zhi, but it might be a Ji, too, or something else entirely." Granted, some characters, like animals, are easier.

[cglee]

Yes, native Chinese speaker, though English is my best language. I think you can guess based on context as well. Not precise as you'd like, but not a blank slate either.

[pavel_lishin]

Sure, but you can't call up your friend on the phone and ask him what it means. (Not without having to explicitly describe the glyph, anyway.)

[cglee]

Yes you can. Complex characters are usually made up of many foundation characters, so you could describe it to your friend that way.