[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.

[muyuu]

Well, Chinese is not obfuscated. On the contrary, it's written form carries a more direct interpretation that combining alphabet letters.

Do you actually know enough of both Chinese and English to judge this? because it would be a bit silly to discuss with someone who does, if you don't.

[Someone]

I make no claim about Chinese or English. I merely pointed out that the logical argument given is flawed, and hence, does not carry weight.

[muyuu]

It's not flawed in its context. It would be flawed if your point was valid. For your point to be valid, the obfuscation you imply should either be true, or unknown. It's not unknown to whoever knows the language. It's simply false.

In other words, you cannot assume a variable to be unknown when one of the parties does know it.