Comment by xanderlewis
2 years ago
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.
Much like in English you can pull out lots of vowels and still read the text, you can cover up the about bottom 40% of the characters in a sentence and still read it.