Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred.<p>Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across.<p>Now, drawing any comparisons is extremely hard because context doesn't translate, so by definition you cannot create a benchmark. For instance, they convey far more information about social nuance and politeness, to levels that would need whole paragraphs per sentence to explain.<p>Also, syllables are a horrible benchmark for Japanese since all their syllables are extremely short and quick to pronounce. Their encoding, so to speak, consists of a smaller unit size and a bigger number of units. They have a compression system for text, which is the mixture of kanji and kana.<p>This basically goes to show how unique Japanese is in many respects and how differently they communicate.

I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language.<p>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there."<p>There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables].<p>I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this.<p>[1] <a href="http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...</a>

It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom).<p>Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese.<p>A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite.<p>In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.

It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable:<p>"The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione &#38; Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)."<p>Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers.<p>The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -&#62; the language tends to be spoker more slowly).<p>This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies.<p>To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there.<p>That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.

<i>maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken.</i><p>From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus:<p>Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice.<p>Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness.<p>Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken.<p>Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.

It's also subject to poor interpretation:<p><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_shortfilms" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_...</a>

When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne... "

I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most languages.<p>Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly hard.

This explains every Final Fantasy game ever made.