Re:China now the most prolific contributor to physical scien...
by bayesian_horse on Monday September 17, 2018 @03:36AM
(#18003890)
It's an objective reality that the Chinese language has a higher information density per syllable and that "transmission" of speech is more easily disrupted. Native Mandarin speakers sometimes even have trouble communicating face to face and "write" characters with a finger on the other's palm.
It's also an objective reality that it takes more pieces of information to learn the Chinese representation of an English term than the other way around.
It doesn't mean learning English is always easier than Chinese, though it actually is for maybe even most Humans on earth.
You likely come (as did I) from a background in which such languages are quite unfamiliar but that doesn't make them harder or easier in general. John DeFrancis wrote a funny essay about the "Japanese plan to replace the Roman alphabet within their empire after conquering North America" as a parody of the people who think that the Chinese and Japanese should replace their writing with an alphabetic approach.
You may not realize how hard it is for many speakers to learn English spelling where spelling is more conservative (to preserve meaning) than more phonetic writing systems like German, Spanish, Korean etc. The terms are seemingly more obscure. In fact it's to reduce that problem that we violate English "rules" to conserve the declension of the original noun (e.g. felid/felidae) which is uniform when the term is a loan word common across languages.