As Chinese is to English, Regular Expressions are to…
Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.
I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of thousands of characters to learn, however once each is known the brain can easily scan and read it. However with English there seems to be much more decoding happening. Words are formed from letters which means that the brain has to recognise each letter in turn. Or at least enough to make a sensible guess.
It occurred to me this is somewhat like Regular Expressions. Regex is notoriously difficult to master, and yet once it is offers a powerful, concise way to express what could take many lines of conventional code.
I don’t think there is a lesson here, but I do find it interesting that there are a couple of approaches to both reading and programming with different advantages. One offers a low barrier to entry but repeatedly extracts a cost in efficiency, the other offers more prohibitive learning curve, but yields high gains once the threshold is reached.
I really love Regex, maybe I should learn Chinese so I can read more quickly.
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chinese, language, informationprocessing, cathyma
October 1st, 2007 at 11:52 am
Chinese is, I think, an easier language for Anglophones to learn than French or German. Mandarin (which I took at uni) has an incredibly easy grammatical structure and - once you get past the idea of a tonal language - is quick to pick up.
I think this is because of two things
1) There is nothing “similar” in the language. Listening to European languages is tricky because you pick up words which sound similar to English. This confuses the brain into trying to recognise other words as English.
2) People who use the Roman alphabet tend to recognise the whole word rather than spell it out - recognising a Mandarin pictogram is a similar process.
T
(Good meeting you at BarCamp, BTW)
December 4th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Wow, love the idea that it is faster to read in Chinese than English. My grandparents were born in China, but I never asked the question about which was faster to read! My parents, and I, born in Australia can’t read Chinese…
…so I learnt Mandarin at uni, but in comparison to learning French at school, I found it more challenging. I agree the grammar is more simple, but in French I could guess many words - in Chinese it is a hard slog memorising all those characters. Now days I can recognise and understand some French, but not a word (or character) of Chinese …
December 5th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I am a native Chinese. I agree with Terence and want to add that learning to read Chinese is easier than speaking or listening. The grammar structure is not complicated, and the volcabulary is relatively small - if you grasp 6000 Chinese characters, you can read newspaper. However, listening is more challenge, 2 reasons:
1. 6000+ Chinese characters share less than 300 pronounciations.
2. There are too many dialets in China and you will find that a large % of Chinese don’t speak Mandarin.
Anyway, why not try to learn Chinese.