According to this article, Japanese is much faster than English in terms of syllable per second. Since the majority of the forum members here are learning Japanese as a foreign language, do you feel Japanese is faster than other languages you speak?

I've read about similar research comparing speed between English and Japanese years ago, and the results were pretty much the same: English is way slower. Another indirect evidence is how Japanese can only convey little information explicitly in lyrics compared with English. This is well-known among J-E bilinguals, but it's quite obvious that if you translate English lyrics into Japanese, you should cut out a lot of words and sentences or make a completely new one up. This is because one musical note roughly corresponds to one syllable while Japanese tends to require more syllables to carry the same amount of information than English. It's reasonable to assume that different languages take up roughly the same amount of time to express the same idea, which is partially confirmed in the research referred to in the linked article. So naturally Japanese must be faster in terms of syllable per second, and hence is at disadvantage when it comes to expressing ideas explicitly in lyrics.

One thing that might make Japanese sound slower is that a Japanese syllable almost always consists of one consonant and one vowel, with the notable exception being one consonant syllable ん. Because English (and many other languages) can have multiple consonants in one syllable, if we say your average Japanese syllable and English syllable at the same speed, each consonant and vowel should be pronounced faster in English.

It's quite hard to compare the speed between languages you already speak. But some people may still be able to notice speed differences between languages. What do you think?

It's hard to objectively say how fast a language sounds, because there is a general tendency for less familiar languages to sound a lot faster than familiar ones.

Nonetheless, after a long time studying it on and off, Spanish still sounds extremely fast to me, and even though I can read it to an intermediate degree, I can still hardly catch a single word when people are talking. Maybe some day...

JimmySeal Wrote:It's hard to objectively say how fast a language sounds, because there is a general tendency for less familiar languages to sound a lot faster than familiar ones.

Yes, I too think, that familiarty with a language makes it sound less fast, even when it is spoken in native speed. Native Japanese was incredibly fast at first. The first time I came in touch with it was when I was working with An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. The words and sentences flew by, and at first I thought, that my Media Player was at fault. It was too fast to really understand anything at all.

Because I got curious, I took the CD, to which I am listening to right now. It feels as if the tracks became slower. I can now follow the text by just listening to it, and understand it, without much effort. This supports JimmySeals theory that it is familiarity that makes it feel very fast or normal.

Since we have many newbie learners here, maybe we could carry out our own little test? They could listen to the following track which is roughly 23MB large, and say how fast it feels to them, on a scale of 1 between 10. For me it feels like 4 right now.

English can be a pretty fast spoken language, too, btw. Think of the sports events and the commentators for instance, how incredibly fast they are talking vs. the average speed of your native speaker.

And here is something that would probably allow for another comparison. The ratio of words in a sentence to convey the same message in both Japanese and English. As it so happens, yesteray I started reading the lyrics of Lés Miserables. Here we can see that Japanese tends to need more words, to express the same thing, in English.

But I do think, that Japanese is faster and more efficient, because more things can be expressed in less words. Even one word can make for a perfectly fine sentence in Japanese. So I see Japanese at an advantage there.

I think perceived speed is more about how good is your skill in that language rather than because of how quickly and how many syllables are spoken. To me Japanese sounds "normal" but there are people and situations where its just too fast for me (since I still suck). I do sometimes get a feeling: "that's a lot characters/sounds to say something as simple as..." but only when reading.

Just to experiment check out this movie below, its some sort of speed rapping record by a Polish rapper using first English and later Polish. Which one seems faster?

To me both sound fast but comprehensible (not on the first try and while being really focused), it'd say English sounds a bit slower but that's probably because he wasn't born bilingual and is naturally slower.

I wonder how advanced Japanese learners would feel about similar "song" in Japanese.

JimmySeal Wrote:Nonetheless, after a long time studying it on and off, Spanish still sounds extremely fast to me, and even though I can read it to an intermediate degree, I can still hardly catch a single word when people are talking. Maybe some day...

I also studied Spanish for a while and it does sound extremely fast, it'll be my next language after Japanese

Update:

Nagareboshi Wrote:Since we have many newbie learners here, maybe we could carry out our own little test? They could listen to the following track which is roughly 23MB large, and say how fast it feels to them, on a scale of 1 between 10. For me it feels like 4 right now.

Assuming 1 is the slowest and 10 the fastest, I'd say its around 3-4 for me. Definitely sounds way slower than normal speech and unnatural but it reminds me of narration from Harry Potter audiobooks. I was learning Japanese for a longer while on my first try with them and back then they seemed extremely fast, so fast I gave up (I'd say 8 in this scale).

Yes, 1 is the slowest, 10 the fastest. It is textbook audio from An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, that is probably why it feels unnatural to you.

As for the video, it is incredibly fast but still easy to understand. Which again supports the theory about familiarity with a language, that makes the language sound faster and harder to understand, in general. It is maybe because I was paying attention to it, that i noticed the polish part sounding faster, but this is only because I hardly know any polish.

Just curious, how would you rate the naturalness of those tracks which can also be used for the expirment. In case someone does not want to donwload the track from 2-shared.

The article's basic results don't surprise me, although it is true that 'syllable' is not a good comparison between English and Japanese. 'Breathe' is a one -syllable- word but it is packed with sounds. I do think that English sounds slower for that reason - less syllable breaks, more consonant combinations.

Also there are many more vowel sounds and I think that accounts for some actual speed difference - a study on -that- would be interesting too - but without one, it seems to me that a speaker needs to vocalize vowels for a longer period of time when there's more possible vowel sounds. Japanese with a mere 5 choices blips by with a sound that just barely suggests a vowel was there, except for long vowels of course.

English can't do that - consider, tan, tone, tin, tine, ton, toon, teen ... context will narrow things down but sounding that vowel really is important!

I am, however, surprised that Japanese lyrics are conveying less information than English lyrics. Japanese may need more syllables per word, but it usually needs -less- words per sentence (unless you're being formal, of course, but that's not the case in lyrics). I expected those two things to balance out better.

It's been a long time since I studied German, but it never sounded -fast- to me that way. Incomprehensible at times, as in 'too fast for -me- to understand' but not fast the way Japanese can sound 'how can anyone pronounce that quickly and doesn't the speaker need to breathe sometimes' fast.

Nagareboshi Wrote:Just curious, how would you rate the naturalness of those tracks which can also be used for the expirment. In case someone does not want to donwload the track from 2-shared.

I tried a couple of them (only Listening sections) from beginning and end, all sound unnatural and slower than usual, interestingly 敬語 one seems to feel the fastest but I cannot tell if its because my 敬語 comprehension sucks or because of its "natural" setting. I was listening to them while still having radio on ("always on" policy, not songs but talks work wonders for me) and literally heard how DJ was "overtaking" these examples

I can't really speak for comprehension speeds, but I think the article is right in many ways. You can squeeze a lot more Japanese language in very little space, I think this goes for written Japanese and spoken. If you need an example for written, just look at twitter. You can fit a lot of Japanese in 140 characters thanks to Kanji. Even if you look at it syllable by syllable when it turns into spoken, I think you can still fit more information into less space. In addition to this, a lot of Japanese language is omitted simply based on context, there is a lot of needless words that go into an English sentence.

I think a proper measure of the language is how many pieces of data you can fit into X amount of space. Rather then syllables or words. But that might be harder to judge scientifically. The article does talk a bit about "rate of transmission" though, so it's at least aware of these kinda things.

I'm not sure if looking at lyrics is very helpful. Or if you are, you need to look at it in both directions. Are you translating so it still could be sung or just to have a translation at hand? There is often a need to match lyrics to the music, which causes all sorts of odd interactions with translation between languages beyond the scope of what the article is trying to get at.

Daichi Wrote:I can't really speak for comprehension speeds, but I think the article is right in many ways. You can squeeze a lot more Japanese language in very little space, I think this goes for written Japanese and spoken.

I think what the article says is precisely the opposite: Japanese has a very low information density in terms of information per syllable because it only has very few syllables. So to counter that, the Japanese need to speak faster. But even by speaking faster the amount of information transmitted in a given time frame is still significantly lower for Japanese than for English or Mandarin. Or so the article claims.

Link to the original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011...-et-al.pdf

Table 1 on page 544 claims that the information rate for Japanese is lower than for any other language they analyzed. The information rate here is "information per time". They measured it by taking the total time a native speaker needs to read a given paragraph in his language. The paragraphs were translated into different languages and supposed to convey the same amount of information in each language.

So what the paper claims is that spoken Japanese at natural speed conveys less information per minute than other languages.

I have noticed that I thought it was very fast when I began studying it, but I believe your brain needs time to adapt to a new language and new sounds, but as your recognition and understanding improves it starts to sound no faster than any other language you speak. Also I have indeed noticed, as some people have remarked, that the 'information density' if you will, seems lower to me in Japanese.

Christoph_D Wrote:Link to the original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011...-et-al.pdf

Thanks!

So, the paper has the translation in each language they used in Appendix. But are other translations equally sloppy and sound translationese like the Japanese one? The Japanese version sounds sooo translation if you get my drift. And what's with all the typos and weird typesetting?

Christoph_D Wrote:

Daichi Wrote:I can't really speak for comprehension speeds, but I think the article is right in many ways. You can squeeze a lot more Japanese language in very little space, I think this goes for written Japanese and spoken.

I think what the article says is precisely the opposite: Japanese has a very low information density in terms of information per syllable because it only has very few syllables. So to counter that, the Japanese need to speak faster. But even by speaking faster the amount of information transmitted in a given time frame is still significantly lower for Japanese than for English or Mandarin. Or so the article claims.

Link to the original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011...-et-al.pdf

Table 1 on page 544 claims that the information rate for Japanese is lower than for any other language they analyzed. The information rate here is "information per time". They measured it by taking the total time a native speaker needs to read a given paragraph in his language. The paragraphs were translated into different languages and supposed to convey the same amount of information in each language.

So what the paper claims is that spoken Japanese at natural speed conveys less information per minute than other languages.

Thanks for posting this. I see that my thoughts completely go against what the study is.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this assessment now. This Japanese translation appears to be very verbose. Do people really speak like this?

I think going back to what I was talking about lyrics, you need to approach this from the sense of native text in each language. Probably impractical to do, but take a native bit of text from all of these languages and get proper translations to each of the other ones. Once you have done this, I think you could get a better judge on the data rate you can convey with each language. But I think these sentences alone are too narrow to get a proper judgement.

Edit: For all I know, it is right, but I just think they could of come up with a better method. Based on my limited exposure to the Japanese language it just feels like you can fit a lot of data in a little amount of space. I don't think there is any arguing about the amount of characters in the written language.

Maybe there are all the shortcuts in Japanese to say less because the information rate is slower, and it's one way for them to speed it up. I'd just like to see this part taken into the equation.

Daichi Wrote:In addition to this, a lot of Japanese language is omitted simply based on context, there is a lot of needless words that go into an English sentence.

お教えになってくださってどうもありがとうございました。またポストを書いていただければ幸いです。

Quote:This Japanese translation appears to be very verbose. Do people really speak like this?

I don't see anything particularly unusual or verbose about the Japanese there. If anything, the actual spoken form would be even longer because it would have false starts and additional aizuchi.

Hmm, I agree with everyone that when one doesn't know any Japanese, native audio sounds fast, but when they understand it, it seems to be at a normal, everyday speed.

I think I might read vertical Japanese a little faster than English though. There's something about the text being vertical that just makes the words "flow faster", if that makes sense.