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The difference is that most people are not used to reading all caps, whereas for example people in China use blocks of characters all the time and can parse the

by wibr 10y ago

The difference is that most people are not used to reading all caps, whereas for example people in China use blocks of characters all the time and can parse them quickly. In addition, now you can just skim the report quickly to see if there is anything BIG coming.

kqr 10y ago
The ability to more quickly recognise shapes when they are visually distinct, compared to when they are visually similar, is not a cultural or habitual thing. I'm sure a Chinese person can read Chinese faster than I can, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit from more visually distinct characters.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Kronopath 10y ago
  In my opinion, this is actually one of the benefits of simplified characters as compared to traditional. They have much more varied shapes and as such are easier to tell apart at a glance: compare characters like: 双飞机会带着几个人 to: 雙飛機會帶著幾個人 Both are actually the same set of characters, but the first one seems much easier to distinguish at a glance. I'd suspect this would Be true even for native speakers/readers, though I've never seen a study on it.
  - eru 10y ago
    Seems definitely plausible given how Chrome renders these on my computer. I wonder how this plays out handwritten on paper?
- gumby 10y ago
  They do benefit from visually distinct characters. They've been optimized for thousands of years and the ones that were hard to recognize morphed or were dropped. That's why recognizing radicals is just a clue rather than a rigid system (similar to how English spelling works). In the case of brahmic scripts (disclaimer: I only learned the Marathi alphabet as a child) you don't "read" the characters any more than you do in English, but rather look at the word shapes. There is continual evolution: in high school we studied Greek with word spacing just like modern English; I was shocked at hard it was to read original inscriptions without word spacing (and some old texts that were boustrophedon). I also thought it would be really hard to read German highway signs, but after a while (less than a year) I started to automatically break the compounds into meaningful chunks while zooming down the road. We have an end result of a process of: consistent writing direction > spacing > punctuation > increased discrimination of letterforms (introduction of the minuscule) > regularization of spelling Typography matters in all these languages. It's not just letterforms: word and sentence spacing varies among English, French and Russian, for instance. Reading really exploits some deep structures in the brain. Articles like these, to me, implicitly say more about neurology than culture.

by wibr 10y ago

kqr 10y ago

The ability to more quickly recognise shapes when they are visually distinct, compared to when they are visually similar, is not a cultural or habitual thing. I'm sure a Chinese person can read Chinese faster than I can, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit from more visually distinct characters.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Kronopath 10y ago
In my opinion, this is actually one of the benefits of simplified characters as compared to traditional. They have much more varied shapes and as such are easier to tell apart at a glance: compare characters like: 双飞机会带着几个人 to: 雙飛機會帶著幾個人 Both are actually the same set of characters, but the first one seems much easier to distinguish at a glance. I'd suspect this would Be true even for native speakers/readers, though I've never seen a study on it.
- eru 10y ago
  Seems definitely plausible given how Chrome renders these on my computer. I wonder how this plays out handwritten on paper?
gumby 10y ago
They do benefit from visually distinct characters. They've been optimized for thousands of years and the ones that were hard to recognize morphed or were dropped. That's why recognizing radicals is just a clue rather than a rigid system (similar to how English spelling works). In the case of brahmic scripts (disclaimer: I only learned the Marathi alphabet as a child) you don't "read" the characters any more than you do in English, but rather look at the word shapes. There is continual evolution: in high school we studied Greek with word spacing just like modern English; I was shocked at hard it was to read original inscriptions without word spacing (and some old texts that were boustrophedon). I also thought it would be really hard to read German highway signs, but after a while (less than a year) I started to automatically break the compounds into meaningful chunks while zooming down the road. We have an end result of a process of: consistent writing direction > spacing > punctuation > increased discrimination of letterforms (introduction of the minuscule) > regularization of spelling Typography matters in all these languages. It's not just letterforms: word and sentence spacing varies among English, French and Russian, for instance. Reading really exploits some deep structures in the brain. Articles like these, to me, implicitly say more about neurology than culture.