wffong@torolab4.vnet.ibm.com ("Weng Fatt Fong") (04/03/91)
Ref: Message-ID: <1991Apr2.191453.26206@lgc.com> cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird) writes... >>The fastest I heard from Chinese in soc.culture.china was >>50,000 characters per minute and for English >>5,000 words a minute. On the average a Chinese word >>is two characters. >Is the whole curve shifted? Do "average" Chinese >and Japanese literates read five times as fast as >their Latin-alphabet counterparts? I have not read the original append in soc.culture.china, but I think there might be a misinterpretation of sorts along the bandwidth. I know there have been studies that showed the Chinese language to have 4 to 5 times more information content than English. Probably someone translated that to mean a Chinese reader can "speed read" 50,000 Chinese characters in one minute!! Weng Fatt Fong wffong@torolab4.vnet.ibm.com