Quote:
Originally Posted by ParaPara
Let's say that 100 native English writers and 100 native Japanese writers are sitting in a room. At the same time, they all write the following sentence: I went into the house to grab a soda, but there was no soda in the refrigerator. My guess is is that the English writers would be done with the sentence quicker.
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On a PC, Japanese would kill English dead in speed*. If you use the KANA keyboard where there is a key assigned for every kana (and not romaji), then the sentence would consist of 26 keystrokes and a couple of space key strokes for conversion where as the English version, even if shortened requires many many many more keystrokes.
家にソーダを取りにいったが、冷蔵庫になかった。(30 keystrokes using KANA keyboard, around 40+ strokes if it's romaji input)
I went into the house to grab a soda, but there were none in the refrigerator. (70+ key strokes)
* (fine print) assuming Kanji conversion don't screw up.
Either way, Japanese wins because a computer can write Kanji at the same speed as a roman alphabet but Kanji contains a LOT more information than a roman letter. With PCs, you have taken away the disadvantage of the slower speed of writing Kanji so naturally you would expect Japanese to win big time.
As for writing, I think it would take a similar amount of time but it depends whether the English speakers are using short hand and whether the Japanese speakers are writing cursive 草書.