What is sacrificed in the Chinese language to make it the world's most compact and efficient? What tasks are more difficult or time consuming in Chinese? There must be some kind of trade-off.
汉语做出了哪些牺牲，才使她成为世界上最紧凑、最高效的语言？她在哪些方面使用起来比较困难或耗时？肯定存在一些平衡折中吧
评论翻译
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.com 转载请注明出处
Mo Chen, lives in China (1989-present)
Mo Chen，在中国生活（1989年至今）
This question right here is one of the more legitimate questions I’ve seen on Quora about Chinese language.
We write in Chinese characters, called Hanzi. The entirety of our language is consisted of it.
I won’t know enough about all languages in the world to claim that it’s the “world’s most compact and efficient” one, but it’s definitely at the top of the list, if it is not at the absolute top of it.
Just look at how compact this language is (I have avoided using four-character expressions):
你的提问算是我在Quora上看到的关于汉语的比较合理的一个问题了。我们用来书写的汉字，读作“Hanzi”。我们的整个语言体系就是由它构成的。
由于不够了解世界上所有其他的语言，我不能断言汉语是“世界上最紧凑、最高效的语言”，但就算不是无可争议的第一名，它也绝对会是排名最靠前的之一。
看看这种语言有多紧凑吧（我已尽量避免使用四字短语）：
Its advantage would have been more prominent over modern English, which seemed like a much more justifiable tradeoff in its complexity of each character structure. And this is how most Chinese texts are written in dynasty period, because the ancient Chinese people realize that it’s such a hassle writing each character. To quote their own words “(You should) cherish characters as you cherish gold”, or 惜字如金. By this principle, if a thing can be described with two characters, they would not use a third one.
The ancient way of writing is almost half length as that of modern Chinese language, which is already shorter than that of English.
Mind-boggling, isn’t it?
If it is any consolation, you should know that today, most people in China are not proficient in ancient Chinese. We cannot read it easily without external help, much less write in it. In a way, you can regard ancient Chinese a different language than modern Chinese.
和现代英语比起来，古汉语的优势就更明显了，似乎也更能平衡它在字符结构上的复杂度。而这就是封建王朝时期几乎所有中文文献的写法，因为古代中国人也意识到书写的麻烦，用他们自己的话说就是“（你应该）像珍惜黄金一样珍惜你的用字”——即，惜字如金。根据这一原则，如果能用两个字描述一件事，就绝不用第三个字。按古汉语的方式书写，长度几乎只有现代汉语的一半，而后者已经比英文精简了。
令人难以置信，是不是？
但话又说回来，时至今日大多数中国人都不再精通古汉语了。如果没有任何辅助，我们要读懂它们都不容易，更不要说用古汉语写作。在某种程度上，你甚至可以认为古汉语是不同于现代汉语的另一种语言。
What about 万人空巷? Or “ten thousand people absent from alleys”? If we say there is a concert of Jay Chow in the city, and it had made the city “ten thousand people absent from alleys”? Does that mean the concert is popular, or so bad that people are fleeing the city?
It actually means the concert is extremely popular, people leave their homes to see it, making the homes empty.
And how about we say a girl is 沉鱼落雁? Or “Fish sinks in water, duck falls from the sky”? Is it she was so ugly that creatures die when they see her?
No, it is actually the highest praise of beauty, it means when a fish sees her it forgets to swim, and a duck sees her it forgets to flap.
但另一个例子，“万人空巷”又如何？它字面意思是“街巷里一下少了一万人而空空荡荡”。比如，“周杰伦举办的演唱会让整座城市万人空巷”，这是指演唱会很受欢迎呢，还是太可怕人们不得不大量逃离城区？
实际上它是指演唱会非常受欢迎，人们全都跑去参加以至别处都空空荡荡。
用成语形容一个女孩“沉鱼落雁”又是什么意思？字面上它是说这女孩“让鱼都沉到水底，大雁从天上掉下来”——难道是说她长得太奇特，动物们看她一眼就全都翘了辫子？
不，实际上这是对美的最高评价，意思是鱼儿见了她忘了游动，大雁看到她也忘了扇动翅膀。
（答者原文：）
你上公交了么？我上了。
你上清华了么？我上了。
你上小学了么？我上了。
对面白虎位置不好，我们可以打这波团战！我上了。(DOTA the game)
你手表记得上发条。我上了。
炒土豆上酱油了么？我上了。
四号桌菜好了。我上了。
开荒打团了，你人呢？我上了。(World of Warcraft the game)
做好战斗准备，枪都上上膛。我上了。
To conclude: In order to achieve conciseness compared to English Language, Chinese language has sacrificed three things:
1. Easiness to write individual characters.
2. Explicit and articulating regular expressions.
3. Independency from context.
总结一下：为了达到简捷化，与英语相比，汉语做了三个方面的牺牲：
1，单个字符的书写难度
2，大量明确而严格的固定表达法
3，对语境的高度依赖
Michael Zhang, Astrophysics graduate student
Michael Zhang，天体物理学研究生
Short answer: Chinese (specifically Mandarin) is spoken more slowly.
Long answer: This paper investigates the syllable rate, information density, and information rate of different languages. Information density is what you’re thinking of when you say “compact and efficient”. It’s the amount of information, on average, that each syllable of the language contains. Syllable rate is how many sounds an average speaker speaks per second. Information rate is information density multiplied by syllable rate—that is, the amount of information conveyed every second by a speaker.
简短地说：汉语（尤其是普通话）说起来比较慢。
详细回答：http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/ful ... appear_Language.pdf（文章标题：《不同语种口语表达信息率的对比分析》）这篇文章研究了不同语言的音节速率、信息密度和信息速率。当你说“紧凑而高效”时你所指的应该就是信息密度了——即每一个音节包含的平均信息量；音节率则是指说话者每秒钟能讲出多少个音节；信息速率就是用信息密度乘以音节速率，即说话者每秒钟所能传递的信息量。
表1：不同语言的信息密度、音节速率、信息速率对比。（取平均值，误差不超过5%；以越南语为基准参照）
If you look at Table 1 on page 40, you see that Mandarin has the highest information density of all the languages they considered, but also the lowest syllable rate, at 5.18 syllables per second. On the other hand, Spanish has the lowest information density, but the highest syllable rate (7.82 syllables per second). These balance out so that every language they tested, except for Japanese, has a very similar information rate. (I’m not sure why Japanese is such an outlier, but this reddit thread has a few clues.)
可以看看第40页的表1，你会发现普通话的信息密度是他们所考察的所有语言中最高的，但相应地，音节速率也是最低的，约为每秒5.18个音节。与之相比，西班牙语的信息密度最低，但音节率却最高（达每秒7.82个音节）。经此平衡，使得除了日语之外，每种受测语言都有非常接近的信息速率。（我不确定为什么日语如此奇葩，但Reddit上的这个帖子似乎提供了一些线索：https://www.reddit.com/r/askscie ... e_most_information/）
Learning it is extremely time consuming, making it difficult to adopt.
There were about 20 students in my college class, some of whom spoke of their success with other languages, but i would say at least half of them could not have gotten a passing grade that first semester and in the second semester there were only two of us left.
I made flash cards for every word we learned and drilled on those for an hour plus every night. By the end of the year I think there were about 150 words I could reliably speak, hear, read and write and perhaps another 200 that I had some partial mastery of.
That is way less you would acquire studying a European language.
而由于学起来非常耗时，导致它难以被广泛采用。
我大学（中文）班上大约有20名同学，其中一些人已经成功掌握了其它外语，但他们中至少有一半还是在第一学期就挂科了。而到第二学期，我们就只剩下了两个人。
我给我们学的每一个汉字制作速记卡，每天晚上花1个小时努力地学。一年下来，我能准确无误地听、说、读、写的汉字大概有150个，或许还有200个字算是部分掌握的。（这学习能力……）
学一门欧洲国家语言需要的精力实在少太多。
Unlike with an alphabetic language, the writing is little indication of the sound.
Our teacher, from Beijing, also told us of the problem of regional variation in pronunciation and said that people from neighboring areas might be incomprehensible to each other.
You have to go pretty far in the English-speaking world to encounter truly incomprehensible English.
与字母语言不同，汉字书写和发音几乎没有联系。
我们来自北京的老师也给我们介绍过汉字发音的地方差异问题，还说甚至是邻近地区的人可能都无法听懂对方的话。
而在英语世界里，你需要走很远很远的路，才可能遇上你真正听不懂的方言。
Jamie Cawley, LIved in China 2012-2018
Jamie Cawley，2012～2018年生活在中国
James Bollinger, American, Living in Japan
James Bollinger, 美国人，居于日本
I speak and read Japanese about as well as an educated native, and I’ve dabbled in Chinese, but as others have said, the characters are very information dense. One character in Chinese or Japanese could have the same information as several in English.
On the other hand, the syllables themselves are not quite as dense (in Japanese, especially), and there are many homophones. There are so many homophones in Japanese that reading in the phonetic alphabet is much much harder than reading in the Chinese characters.
我的日语读、说能力不输给受过教育的当地人。我也曾涉猎过汉语，但正如其他人所说，汉字的信息密度非常大。汉语或日语中的一个字符包含的信息可以相当于好几个英文单词。
另一方面，（尤其是日语的）音节本身密度却不那么高，还有就是大量同音字。日语中的同音字如此之多，以至如果仅靠读注音，要弄懂它比读汉字的拼音还要困难很多很多。
Anonymous
Oral communication is more difficult.
Because of the compact language, there is only a little room for error in spoken Chinese. It has been shown that Chinese is spoken slower than other languages. It makes sense, considering that there is only a little room for error, it has to be spoken slowly. “inefficient” English and French, on the other hand, can be spoken rapidly.
（汉语）口语交流相对比较困难。
正因为汉语的紧凑性，讲汉语时容错空间非常小。已经有研究表明，讲汉语比讲其它语言的速度慢。这也很合理，考虑到她极小的容错空间，你必须慢慢讲话。与之相比，“低效”的英语和法语可以说得很快。
