Comment by mchaver
2 years ago
The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
I’m not sure how much evidence there is for that either — a Chinese friend couldn’t believe that I could just look at a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it was about; she, despite her fluency in written English, thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid comprehension.
It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute pain at first, then very comfortable.
I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.
Yeah. That was pretty much my point — no native speaker is even looking at each letter (or even each word), wnlch js wzy yxu cyn upigemqand thws siktsmce wjtdut mnrh of a ptublim. Each word is its own shape, much like how Chinese speakers aren’t looking at each stroke.
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> information density of writing
I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
I was reading a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.:
was translated into
I don't speak Chinese, but my understanding is that it's not a totally fair comparison: classical Chinese text was often highly abbreviated, to such a degree that you have to be an expert historian to interpret it correctly.
For example, the characters comprising your example text starts like:
collect (收) [from] [all] soldiers (兵) under the sky (天下), gather (聚) at(?) (之) Xianyang (咸陽), melt (銷) and (以) become(?) (為) bell-stand (鍾鐻) metal (金) person (人) twelve (十二) ...
As you can see, the English "translation" is more like an annotated translation. E.g., the original doesn't say who did it, or what he collected from soldiers: we just inferred "weapon" because what else could be melted into statues?
Similarly, "standardized the axle width of carriages" is just: cart (車) same (同) axle width (軌). We're supposed to infer "standardized" because we are talking about the Emperor's deeds.
Classical Chinese (Ancient or Old Chinese – multiple terms are used), the language the quote was written in that predates Middle Chinese and, by extension all modern Chinese languages, had a very different grammar with many features of it having all but disappeared from all Chinese languages. Classical Chinese texts are incomprehensible to a modern Chinese person who has not invested sufficient amounts of time and effort into completing Classical Chinese studies first.
There is a book, «Classical Chinese for everyone: a guide for absolute beginners» by Bryan W. van Norden that is easy to read and gives a gentle introduction into Classical Chinese.
The old grammar and vocabulary coupled with the Chinese style of writing metaphorically with an abundant application of allusions and with the same Chinese characters having multiple unrelated meanings, makes Ancient Chinese texts very terse and notoriously difficult to understand even for the educated Chinese people.
I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters.
For example,
"去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket".
3 syllables vs 7 syllables.
To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are mini-words unto themselves.
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