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From: wffong@torolab4.vnet.ibm.com ("Weng Fatt Fong")
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: Chinese speed-reading
Message-ID: <9104022049.AA02561@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 2 Apr 91 20:51:40 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 23

Ref: Message-ID: <1991Apr2.191453.26206@lgc.com>

 cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird) writes...

>>The fastest I heard from Chinese in soc.culture.china was
>>50,000 characters per minute and for English
>>5,000 words a minute.  On the average a Chinese word
>>is two characters.

>Is the whole curve shifted?  Do "average" Chinese
>and Japanese literates read five times as fast as
>their Latin-alphabet counterparts?

I have not read the original append in soc.culture.china, but I
think there might be a misinterpretation of sorts along the
bandwidth. I know there have been studies that showed the Chinese
language to have 4 to 5 times more information content
than English. Probably someone translated that to mean a
Chinese reader can "speed read" 50,000 Chinese characters in
one minute!!

Weng Fatt Fong
wffong@torolab4.vnet.ibm.com