Comment by dheera
6 years ago
Modern Chinese is typically more dense than modern Japanese (which is partially phoenetic), and ancient formal Chinese is even more compact than modern Chinese.
However it's worth noting that Chinese characters are analogous to entire words in English, and are composed of components much like English characters are composed of letters.
For example "thanks" is spelled "t h a n k s"
"謝" is made up of "言 身 寸"
(Of course, the components in Chinese have less correlation to their pronunciation, but the main point I'm making here is that there is a LOT of overlap in the common components used to assemble the entire Chinese lexicon.)
It is really not a fair comparison to compare languages in terms of their number of characters needed to represent something.
Better measures would be the fastest time (in seconds) needed to use speech to convey a concept intelligibly to an average native speaker, or the square centimeters of paper needed to convey an idea given the same level of eyesight.
Indeed, what I meant was basically how much information you could cram into a message in digital medium that is character limited, but not really limited in what characters you can use in it. Like SMS messages or Twitter messages when still limited to 140 characters.