Yeah, what a weird comment.How can you argue that you need more length and characters when comparing 2000-3000 Kanji vs 26 letters (I am ignoring the "kanas" to simplify the argument) It is like saying Hexadecimal is more verbose than binary.
That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement.
- Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables
- Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially)
What about written length? You can see the Japanese sentence is a little longer here (when the English uses a non-monospaced font). It's also enough to demonstrates the why using kanji doesn't always provide the huge reduction/compression that you're expecting.
Wow thanks! I didn't understand that despite being able to read and write Japanese! Sarcasm aside you don't seem to have a very deep understanding so maybe you should be a bit nicer when expressing your opinion.
> 1 kana represents 1 syllable
ちゅ <-- 2 kana, 1 syllable
> BY DEFINITION, more concise than Latin letters
smash <-- 1 syllable, 5 latin letters, ~3 kana in length
スマッシュ <-- 5 kana
For paid translations, English likes to charge by the word, whereas Japanese charges by the character. The rule of thumb for conversion is 2 JP characters --> 1 English word i.e. translating a 1000 character JP document you'll expect about 500 EN words at the end.
