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From:  Flavio Medina
Date:  Thu Jan 17, 2002  5:26 am
Subject:  Writing speed in Japanese


Hello.

As I live in Japan now, and my mother language is
Portuguese (as I'm Brazilian), I have quite good
oportunities to compare linguistic aspects of
completly different writing systems.

Someone said in some point that writing in Chinese
would be "slower". Oh well, here I have to disagree.
In the first place, as it happens in SW, many concepts
that need long explanations or descriptions in English
require no more than two or three kanjis (Japanese
characters derived from China). And as everyone
already commented, there is "formal kanjis" and "short
kanjis". When skilled Japanese people write by hand,
they can write each kanji nearly as fast as we write
abour two letters - and the absolut majority of their
words don't take more than 2 kanjis to write... you
can imagine then how fast they can put information
down!! The only detail is about readibility
afterwards... for foreigners, or at least for me, it's
almost impossible "decode" such writing, but they
swear they can read it very easily - or at least as
easily as we read "doctor's writing" kind of writing.

Rikki

\(^o^)/

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