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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you.

But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.

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Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.

That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.

In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.

And the tradeoff is that it's not quite as well optimized for the pattern-matching fast path. The systems just have very different performance/usability characteristics.

I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.

I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".

Sure, but the script speed-reading advantage only comes at the level of having single symbols for single meaning. Once you need to combine symbols to get the (additional) meanings, you're not any faster than phonetics.

Yeah, just like the words "handwriting", "television", "sunshine", "seafood", the meaning of the whole character can be inferred from the parts.

Characters aren't necessary words. In Chinese, a lot of phrases are expressed in groupings of 2 characters and 4 characters.

Especially in these 4 character groupings, you can find a lot of efficiency and elegance. It expresses ideas & meaning that would take 20-100 words to fully express.

Many Chinese words are two characters in length.

The permutation of those 3k,4k,5k characters when combined into 2-character word or 3-character word are huge.

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