SignWriting List Forum| Message 6197 | Previous | Next [ Up Thread ] | Message Index |
|
SignWriting List Forum |
|||
|
|
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^)/ |
|