[quote=“ironlady”]Information density is not necessarily equivalent to faster comprehension through reading. You must also factor in the time needed for processing the information.
[/quote]
Right, information density has nothing to do with comprehension, actually.
But I argue you can set up a model for reading, which consists of picking up information from a page. Now fundamentally, every glance produces a mapping from an eyeful of image data to its information content. A written language with a higher information density does induce a larger codebook for decoding for every glance. Perhaps that’s what you mean by comprehension. The best binary search algorithm scales with the density. Somehow I think our brain does much much better because the whole point of reading training is to grow an implementation of a DIRECT MAP for image decoding – from retina to neurons. (There is a limit of course, to how much information can be directly decoded given finite neuronal resources but that is a property of the person.) However, eye motion is restricted to linear scanning speed no matter what. Therein lies the saving in seeing more information per eyeful. Sure you can just write smaller English to compensate, but there are two things going against it there too: its extreme one dimensional contextual dependency (think the length of two words compared to height --> can solve this problem somewhat by writing English in blocks or narrow columns… ) and the fact that Chinese writing is multiresolution and thus more robust to common decoding error.
OK, fine, none of this is tested, but I definitely think Chinese writing is better for speed reading, which is an image decoding task. It’s the beginning of a theory maybe. The important thing is the premises may or may not be right but they CAN be scientifically tested.
[quote=“ironlady”]
But again, since most people have only one dominant language, it’s hard to design a valid study to prove or disprove this kind of thing.[/quote]
Well… just can’t do a straight language test with all variables controlled. That would be a nice, direct way but certainly not the only way or even the preferred way.
I guess what I am trying to say is if the goal is to understand written langauges, then we should assume the human is optimal in each case, then cut the human out. There are two separate problems here, (1) a quantitative measure of the quality of a written language with respect to some criterion and (2) the achievability of learning by a human… I prefer to deal with the former.
When I studied psycholinguistics at university, our textbook did introduce studies comparing the efficiency of different writing systems. Basically, the studies found that completely phonemic scripts were less efficient. For example, Spanish and German are written more phonemically than English - in fact Spanish is written almost perfectly phonemically - and they were found to be more difficult to read than English. Native speakers read them more slowly. English spelling, which is so often seen as a problem, actually helps us read faster.
The reason seemed to be that when written phonemically, any language has a lot of homophones. To understand which word is meant requires a bit of time. The non-phonetic spelling of English makes clearer which word is meant.
The studies’ authors did not test languages like Chinese, but did conclude that since Chinese characters differentiate meaning even more than English spelling, it probably should be more efficient.
Mandarin (not “Chinese,” please) does not have 170 words pronounced yi. [/quote]
So the obvious question to cranky - is it more or less than 170!!!?
170 is apparently an overkill if you are talking simple chinese (excuse me for using commonly understood expressions) - there are 123 in my word processor (based on cedict I believe) and 250 in the traditional.
I guess it is not the most highly aclaimed dictionary in the world - but until I find something easier to use, it will generally be my first reference.
Mandarin (not “Chinese,” please) does not have 170 words pronounced yi.
I’ve said this before: Mandarin has no chance of becoming a real international language as long as the powers that be continue to insist that Chinese characters are the One Way to write the language. Characters are just too much trouble and take too much time to learn.[/quote]
are you suggesting that Chinese should be written in pinyin?
just out of curiosity, is it me or is Chinese really just more complicated even for native speakers. e.g. if we gave the “same” essay, one in Chinese, one in English to 2 native speakers or 1 person with ‘equal’ fluency, which one, all things being equal, would finish reading faster and comprehend better. I have 2 observations from a ‘similar situation’:
the English reader was able to skim/scan and digest faster
the English reader was able to comprehend accurately the content overall, because the Chinese language lends itself to multiple interpretations and variation and is generally less “precise”. i realise this happens in any language, but English at least generally can be more precise than Chinese. (which might make Chinese a wonderfully rich, deep language for metaphors, poetry, etc, but not say for a scientific document).
btw, this is a generalization but I think it does have some merit.[/quote]
Many years ago I had a company sponsered course on Asian languages (and how to deal with them) in Australia. It arose due to the company’s increasing involvement in Asia. I will admit they were probably biased to European Languages.
In a table of “the means to easily express yourself and be readily understood” Swiss German was at the top - English about 4th - and most Asian languages (including the major Chinese dialects) were followed mainly by African Languages at the bottom of the table.
[quote=“rian”]Many years ago I had a company sponsered course on Asian languages (and how to deal with them) in Australia. It arose due to the company’s increasing involvement in Asia. I will admit they were probably biased to European Languages.
In a table of “the means to easily express yourself and be readily understood” Swiss German was at the top - English about 4th - and most Asian languages (including the major Chinese dialects) were followed mainly by African Languages at the bottom of the table.[/quote]
So you’re saying…???
Another piece of anecdotal evidence. What did they base this ranking on? As you said, it’s probably highly biased toward European languages. I’m sure a native speaer of Xhosa doesn’t have any difficult expressing himself easily and being readily understood by another native speaker of Xhosa, despite its relatively low ranking on the table.
Guys, (everyone, not specifically you, rian! ) we’ve got to stop comparing apples and oranges if you seriously want to have a meaningful discussion on this topic. Otherwise, we’re just shooting the breeze.
My Chinese is a little past rudimentary now - but I wonder why do they keep repeating verbs a little different - in a second phrase. Is it because you might miss the meaning of the first one???
The transalation of the Dr Lien “interview” was probably an excelent transaltion by a native Chinese (excuse me cranky for again using commonly understood terms) - but the thing that stands out to me in the Chinese is repeated but slightly different verbs.
It is sort of like you have to try again to make the Chinese meaning clear.
Ironlady - I am sure you are right about what your kid did this morning - but I am sure your Xhosa technician would very rapidy move to another language to discuss something technical that they had not seen before. “This thing” is a fantastic expresion while “these things” are small in number.
I do find it much easier to read Chinese than Russian, 2 foreign non-latin languages to me. When I see a Chinese character, I can see immediately what is it, but with Russian I have to read it out letter by letter, seems to take longer. Only works with the few characters I know of course, and looking up the ones you don’t know is a bit of a bugger.
If technicians were educated in Xhosa, then they would speak Xhosa for technical subjects. People often switch to Mandarin from Taiwanese on technical subjects, but these days more and more of them are staying in Taiwanese.
Do you think English, for example, would be insufficient to discuss things we had never seen, if they were suddenly plopped down in front of us by some kind of extra-terrestrial being? Languages have mechanisms that deal with this kind of problem quite nicely. Even what you would consider a “backward” language like Xhosa doesn’t come with a fixed, completely immutable set of words. If there are still people using the language daily, it will grow and change based on its environment and what it needs to be used for.
Another good example is modern Hebrew – do you really think they had telephones, fax machines and the like in the Old Testament times? Yet Hebrew seems to work quite well for high-tech stuff in the Israeli army, doesn’t it?
Hi Fluff,
I think that might have to do with your degree of proficiency in reading Russian (or in Russian in general).
Skilled readers of English don’t spell out the words – they recognize whole words, often by shape. There was a thread awhile back about how you could scramble up the middle letters of a word, but as long as the first and last letters were intact, and the context of the sentence was OK, people had no difficulty whatsoever reading the message.
Now looking up characters – that’s one point where alphabets have it all over Chinese! Of course that’s why fonts with zhuyin on the side were invented, right??
Exactly, with Chinese you don’t have to go through the ‘read it out letter by letter’ stage, you go straight to the recognise the whole word at once. My profiency in Russian is exactly zero, my point was that it takes pratice to recognise whole words in an alphabet, even if you know the alphabet. I just thought it was relevant to the discussion.
I think (printed) Chinese is probably easier to read than Arabic where I can’t even see where one letter ends and the next one starts. Chinese characters are nice and seperate.
I’d beg to differ slightly there O Fluffy One. While I was learning to read Chinese, and even now when I come across an unfamiliar word, I went through things character by character, which is not necessarily word by word…
Another interesting point would be to find out whether, although the length the gaze has to cover is shorter because Chinese characters are little squares instead of big elongated rectangles, is there any price in efficiency in recognizing the characters because there are more possibilities and there is probably more information density involved? It’s been shown in studies using MRI scans on readers of Chinese that there are different processing times involved in character recognition. Most of the studies I’ve read have to do with character frequency (i.e., high-frequency characters are recognized faster than lower-frequency characters). I wonder if complexity of the character has anything to do with it, or if (as I would suspect) it might be two different things – i.e., frequently encountered characters are immediately recognized as an integrated whole, but less-frequent ones might have to be “examined” in more detail??
I think the MRI studies also showed that different areas of the brain were activated in English and Chinese reading tasks, but they were not using balanced bilinguals. I offered to let them put my head (and the heads of various volunteers I was sure I could scare up on Forumosa) into the machine and see what lights up with a foreigner with acquired Chinese reads characters, but no takers as of yet.
[quote=“ironlady”]Skilled readers of English don’t spell out the words – they recognize whole words, often by shape. There was a thread awhile back about how you could scramble up the middle letters of a word, but as long as the first and last letters were intact, and the context of the sentence was OK, people had no difficulty whatsoever reading the message.
Now looking up characters – that’s one point where alphabets have it all over Chinese! Of course that’s why fonts with zhuyin on the side were invented, right?? [/quote]
Readers of English don’t sound out a word to recognize it - they recognize the shape, as you say. This is why languages that are spelled phonemically are thought to be slightly slower to read - the fact that they are spelled phonemically leads readers to sound out the word. This takes longer than just recognizing the shape.
This should then mean that a language like Chinese which is written with meaning-based characters (and is not sound-based, though there are some sound/character pairings - I know) should be more efficient to read. Reading Chinese characters bypasses the sounds and goes straight to the meanings.
The following has research studies to back it up:
From least to most efficient to read: Spanish German English
From completely phonemically-spelled to not: Spanish German English
Therefore, I cannot help but think that a language that has pretty well abandoned the attempt to base its writing system on the sounds of the language will be even more efficient to read than English.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to design studies to prove it. Until the day I start my doctorate in psycholinguistics, or someone else comes up with studies proving it one way or the other, we’re going to have to rely on our experiences learning languages in any discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of writing Chinese in pinyin or characters.
Often when reading a novel I never phoneitcly resolve the characters’ names if they are foreign or not common English or French names. As someone said above - you recognise the shape (and remember the first character of the word).
Confusing??? Characters in the story and characters in words???
Often I would be unable to answer a verbal question as to “what were the names of the people in the story?”.
) we’ve got to stop comparing apples and oranges if you seriously want to have a meaningful discussion on this topic. Otherwise, we’re just shooting the breeze.
