Thanks for calling me out, there. I did some digging and I _think_ this is where I first came across the idea of "information density" as a function of info/syl

Thanks for calling me out, there. I did some digging and I _think_ this is where I first came across the idea of "information density" as a function of info/syllables: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971274_A_cross-Language_Perspective_on_Speech_Information_Rate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971274_A_cross-L... The methods this paper employed may certainly be biased in a way that makes Japanese appear less information-dense than other languages. As for the _written_ language's density, that's entirely different! You say that as written, translations come out to be about the same in Japanese and English, I assume this corresponds to roughly the same number of characters as well? If so, if we can believe the authors of the paper above that Japanese has less information-per-syllable, then perhaps Japanese writing's syllabic/ideographic writing system accounts for this handily such that the information density of _written_ Japanese is about the same as written English. For what it's worth, I think you were agreeing with me actually: > Take a look at the front page of a Japanese newspaper and show it to an English speaker, they will think it's "crowded", but I bet if you translated it to English you'd see something that resembles a typical English paper. What I meant here was that in terms of _written_ information density there are clearly significant gains made thanks to the writing system.