You'd expect that a language with greater information density would lead to higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we do in English.
I suspect it's related to the extremely strict and ridged hierarchies in China, and the extremely flexible and implicit social networks. Your boss doesn't ask you to do a favor. They order you. In contrast, you don't ask your neighbour if you can borrow a cup or sugar, you just take it, and pay back the favor some other time. If they don't let you (and don't have a good reason), you just never talk to them again (or if that's too severe, silently downgrade your relationship with them).
Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese. i.e. "My mother made me do my homework, then she made me watch TV".
In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but they mean opposites.
I don't speak Vietnamese, so can't comment directly with that, but I can relate to my experiences in watching public Australian English simplify massively over the past 20 years or so. The wider public take a lot of cues from the media. Soundbite journalism be damned.
How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!
First the article claims that 1 is set arbitrarily to Vietnamese for the value of information density. There are many common ways to normalize measurements, it is obviously not 1/SPSvietnamese for this case. There are most likely other considered factors in the information density calculation (whose unit we don't actually know btw... but it is presented as a ratio otherwise they wouldn't normalize to 1), or they could just be doing some other statistical funging.
Second: With a little bit of thinking you could realize that you aren't getting a good scientifically sound write-up from the Time article -- mostly because this is how they present things (consumable for the masses!). The article writer could be picking completely arbitrary measures as important for people to puzzle over and say "Wow!" at and ignoring the real results. It has happened countless times in the past and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Basically what I am saying: if you want to do the incredulous thing, please put some thought in first.
Didn't I just do that? You seem to assume I am incredulous about the paper whereas I commented on the article.
The conclusion of the article (that all languages transmit data at the same rate) is supported by the research, but not proved by it. I suspect that if you read the paper, the researchers wouldn't make it sound so conclusive.
People who learn Chinese often fret about getting the tones right. The tones just aren't that important - Chinese speakers can generally guess the meaning, though they will think you sound like a 4-year-old if you don't pronounce tones correctly. IMO, getting the vowels and consonants right is harder (and more important).
Seriously, here's the pairs you will confuse:
d / t - d is unaspirated
j / zh - j is a "cjsch" sound (a bit like "Asia") while zh is a "j" sound
q / ch - q is a "bright" (slightly whistled?) ch; ch is a "dark" ch)
x / sh - x is a "bright" sh and sh is a "dark" sh
c / s - c is a "ts", s is just s
b / p - b can sound a little closer to p than in English and p is more aspirated
g / k - g sounds a little close to k, while k is more aspirated
Then there's the vowels, which are really hard. Learning four tones is comparatively easy.
If you don't get the consonants almost 100% correct, people will simply not be able to tell what you are saying. If you don't use tones, they can usually understand, as long as you use simple words (which face it, you will).
This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors:
1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it,
2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and
3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations.
Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance.
Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.
"Do not listen to this person."
Please tone down a bit.
Moreover, I agree with grand-parent: tones should not be held as the most important part when studying Mandarin. It is not.
Tones are completely different from one part of China to the other. In Sichuanhua, a horse is MA4 (down), while it is MA3 (down-up) in Beijinghua and in Putonghua. Quite the opposite. Beside these differences, Sichuanese can be understood in Beijing.
I have been 8 years in China, I work in a Chinese company, I listen, speak, read and write Chinese (not perfectly, but good enough). I never cared that much about tones. I cared about understanding what is said and being understood.
Having enough vocab is the main issue. Knowing the different syntactic sugars used in Mandarin is another. Perfect pronunciation of Putonghua tones is of much lower importance.
There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract:
'''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''
It's interesting that while the Japanese have such a focus on efficiency, their spoken and written language is potentially more contrary to this value than any other language out there.
The article claims less information is encoded in each syllable, not more (as would be expected if more syllables were available).
The Japanese syllabaric alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are larger than the roman alphabet, but the smaller alphabet doesn't mean that Japanese has more syllables than English. English syllables are written using multiple roman letters, and there are far more combinations possible than in hiragana or katakana (hiragana and katakana do allow small letters written between characters to modify the syllables represented, but even taking this into account, there are far more syllables possible when writing English).
On top of this, written hiragana or katakana maps unambiguously to the spoken language, but with English, there is more than one possible pronunciation for many character sequences, and the speaker often needs to know the word and sometimes even how it fits into the sentence to know which of several possible syllables to pronounce.
I'd be interested to see a larger sample of languages, that is, is there a language in which the decrease of either density or speed isn't combined with an increase of the other. (or the opposite) Or are humans all naturally predisposed to generate/accept information at a similar rate?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6r7k345387j14653/
"The reading rates were about 385 equivalent words per minute for Chinese and 380 words per minute for English for the same scientific textual material (Table 1)"
Probably worth digging more to see if the consensus has changed since then. That one was also done with scientific reading material, so might have limited applicability.
