3 ms·
As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms and
by snogglethorpe 13y ago
As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms and much less stuff hidden behind tabs or links.
In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense compared to English.
[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus English... my experience is that it's much harder to cram in what you want to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese characters using multiple bytes each...]
- jakerocheleau 13y agoI've never considered the texting issue with limited characters. It must be the same with tweeting in Japanese vs English characters, too.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoThe interesting thing about Twitter is that the length limit is artificial (as opposed to text messages where I gather it's more a fundamental limitation of some underlying protocol), and it will allow you 140 characters regardless of how many bytes each character uses. So one can actually pack quite a bit into a tweet using CJK languages. My observation is that English tweets tend to be a single sentence or at most two, maybe with some tags on the end, but Japanese tweets are often complete paragraphs with 4 or more sentences, sometimes more like little mini-essays—and I hear Chinese tweets can border on the epic...