Linguistics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I read that Chinese can be read 7% faster than English. Can Hangul also be read 7% faster than English?
Reason to think "no":
Reason to think "yes":
"Reading" means a number of different things, a problem that needs to be be addressed before questions of Hangul vs. English can be addressed. At the most basic level, it refers to the ability to perceive written material and articulate its content. To even talk about a "rate", you have to settle on comparable units. There are no comparable units for perception of written language that can be applied to English and Chinese or Korean. You might count segmental phonemes (if we could agree on the phonemic analysis of the languages, which we cannot), or you count count syllables (if we could agree on the number of syllables in certain words of English, which we cannot). Invoking stress feet would be a better measure for English, but not Chinese or Korean. The count of words would favor English, unless you redefine "word" so that various grammatical words of English are deemed to be part of some other word. Korean words are generally longer than English words. Chinese words are segmentally and syllabically shorter than English words, on average, but Chinese syllables are durationally longer than English syllables, so it matters very much what thing you are measuring. Actually, Hangul and Chinese do not have roughly one character per syllable, since Hangul is more a syllable-structures alphabetic system, see for example [pap] 밥 "rice" with the same-ish character in the northwest and bottom positions and "a" to the Northeast. Chinese 休 and 湖 can be treated as respectively 1 character or 2, or 1 or 3, depending on how you count.
The authors don't take into consideration a well-known cultural difference regarding speed-reading and comprehension, which is that experiential background with timed read-and-respond tests (e.g. the GRE) improves performance on these exams. Certain international students have little experience with these types of tests, while others have substantial experience. This is a further variable, one not controlled for, that can influence reading speed and comprehension, in a way that is not related to language.
Apparently Korean is slower to read than English, according to this study: Korean reading speed: Effects of print size and retinal eccentricity (the main conclusions are in the abstract). They gave 713wpm for Korean, and 787wpm for English. However, as the other answer states, it is difficult to compare across languages. How much meaning does a "word" carry?
There is another study that looked at the information density, or how many "bits" of information there were per syllable. This varied widely between languages (from 5 to 10 bits / syllable) source. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a study that links the two. However, the second study does show that Korean generally contains less information per syllable than English, so since Korean reads slower, and syllables generally contain less information, I would wager the answer is no.
Without diving too deeply into the study in OP--which seems like it would suffer from lots of problems involving comparing "reading speed" using translated and (the author's protestations notwithstanding) non-identical texts, comparing between different people with different backgrounds, strategies, and purposes--it's possible to answer this question from an entirely Korean standpoint, as Korean actually used to use Chinese characters quite a bit. It's much less common today, but as recently as the 1920s political newspaper articles were written at least half in hanja, which were part of the full school curriculum through the 1960s (and are still taught in middle/high school).
Wikipedia cites this source--a general text on the psychology of reading--which in turn cites studies that show 1956 readers read mixed hanja-hangul texts more rapidly than the same texts written purely in hangul; but by 1977, the purely hangul texts were read faster.
Objections could still be made to this comparison, because the two studies were carried out with different participants on different texts. But the different results indicate that there is no universal reading speed advantage between Chinese characters and hangul; and instead suggest that even within a particular language, the individual's experience/comfort with the script is more important than any intrinsic property of the script.
