<p>As a native mandarin speaker I don't quite agree with the examples by blackgreen or user21820.</p>
<p>In my opinion 技艺 is a rather literary word that rarely, if at all, appears in speech, while 技术 is a more casual word; <em>colloquial speech</em> itself is a very important context. Moreover, 我的...很差 is a pretty casual expression. It sounds weird for a literary word to be used together with a casual expression. One either says 我的技术很差, or 我技艺不精. 技艺不精 is a quite common expression, used both in colloquial and formal language. As for 杯具, I don't remember hearing or seeing its usage ever, except as an internet slang for 悲剧. In short, homophones really don't cause much trouble for native speakers. Context <em>is</em> important, but I would hesitate to say we need <em>more</em> context. There's always some context, unless you are doing listening practice instead of actual conversation.</p>
<p>As for tenses, right there's no verb tense in Chinese, but that's what those time indicators are for! Let me try to translate user21820's example. I'm using 读 for read, although 看 is equally fine and more casual.</p>
<p>Past tenses:</p>
<p>I had read the book. 我当时已经读过那本书</p>
<p>I read the book. 我读(完)了那本书</p>
<p>I had been reading the book. 我当时读了那本书有一会儿了/我当时一直在读那本书</p>
<p>Present tenses:</p>
<p>I have read the book. 我读过那本书</p>
<p>I have been reading the book. 我读那本书有一会儿了/我最近(一直)在读那本书   If it were &quot;I have been reading the book for 3 days&quot; then we could simply say 我那本书读了三天了</p>
<p>I am reading the book. 我正在读那本书</p>
<p>Future tenses:</p>
<p>I will have read the book. 我届时会读完那本书</p>
<p>I will read the book. 我会读那本书</p>
<p>I will be reading the book. 我会在读那本书</p>
<p>It's always less ambiguous if the sentence includes time signal, as is often the case in real conversation. E.g., &quot;I will have read the book by the end of this week&quot; translates to &quot;我这周结束前会看完那本书&quot;. In general, adding more information makes the sentence less ambiguous, and I think that's fine, unless you insist on expressing exactly the amount of information you would like to.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-28T04:22:46.193Z
2022-08-28T04:22:46.193Z
xXF
<p><em>blackgreen</em> has already mentioned ambiguity in speech. But I disagree with the notion that ambiguity in tense does not actually exist in Chinese. It does, and nothing anyone can say can eliminate it. Even if you are perfectly fluent in Chinese, it simply does not have the capability to systematically convey the same spectrum of tenses that English can.</p>
<p>For example, consider the following:</p>
<p>Past tenses:</p>
<ol>
<li>I had read the book.</li>
<li>I read the book.</li>
<li>I had been reading the book.</li>
</ol>
<p>Present tenses:</p>
<ol>
<li>I have read the book.</li>
<li>I have been reading the book.</li>
<li>I am reading the book.</li>
</ol>
<p>Future tenses:</p>
<ol>
<li>I will have read the book.</li>
<li>I will read the book.</li>
<li>I will be reading the book.</li>
</ol>
<p>In Chinese, you would likely need the wider context to tell you even whether it is in the past, present or future, but even the context may not tell you clearly which exact tense it is. For example, you might think that you can say &quot;I had read the book&quot; using &quot;我已读了那本书&quot; (assuming it is clear from the context that this is in the past). Sure, but can you easily distinguish between &quot;I have been reading the book&quot; and &quot;I am reading the book&quot;? In practice, the context will tell you the temporal order of events, but in Chinese we often do not convey specific information about the grammatical aspect, whereas English grammar requires specifying that.</p>
<p>In general, I believe most of the difference in precision between English and Chinese stems from the fact that English has a significantly more complicated grammar than Chinese, which enables higher precision at the cost of being more rigid.</p>
<p>Vocabulary wise, there may not be much difference because in any natural language many common verbs and nouns have multiple meanings and require the context to disambiguate. For instance, &quot;想&quot; does mean &quot;think&quot; or &quot;think of&quot;, where &quot;think of&quot; can be used to convey &quot;miss&quot;, and you can be more precise by choosing &quot;想念&quot;. I don't know why you think &quot;让&quot; means &quot;ask&quot;, because it doesn't. (If it does in some dialect, it is like people incorrectly writing &quot;would of&quot; instead of &quot;would have&quot; and &quot;their&quot; instead of &quot;they're&quot; due to hearing them pronounced similarly but not having learnt correct English.)</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T09:50:12.343Z
The point of my remark "that ambiguity in tense does not actually exist in Chinese" is that these ambiguities exist only comparatively, and not in absolute. They do exist, as your examples nicely show, *when you compare Chinese to a language with different grammatical features*. But at the end of the day, when two natives talk these ambiguities slide out of the picture, because the only framework is the one language they are using right now, which is (hopefully) self-consistent.
blackgreen
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T09:50:38.663Z
Ah, I am just learning chinese and in a lesson they said 让 can mean *to ask* as in a request sense [as explained in this post](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/39694/25265).
Puco4
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T09:57:41.917Z
@blackgreen my question was a little bit about whether do you usually need to systematically provide more context in a sentence in chinese than the corresponding sentence in English to remove these ambiguities. Though as you say, maybe the information content is the same in both languages, in English you provide the context through the verb tense, etc. and in Chinese through additional structures.
Puco4
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T10:00:54.480Z
@blackgreen: Thanks for clarifying your point. Certainly, if two people only know the same one language, they are typically unaware of most ambiguities that are clear from external perspective. However, some ambiguities are really obvious. For example every English speaker knows that "you" can be ambiguous since it serves as both the singular and plural. They hence might choose some phrasings to eliminate such ambiguity. Other ambiguities such as fine distinctions of tense may be much less obvious, in line with your "slide out of the picture" remark.
user21820
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T10:05:03.523Z
@Puco4 *maybe the information content is the same in both languages* yes, this is, more or less, what I wanted to say. The **number of morphemes** seems close, even though I'm not able to substantiate this claim with data. It's just my subjective perception.
-> user21820 I agree with you +1
blackgreen
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T10:12:04.287Z
@Puco4: I think you must try to differentiate between literal and figurative senses when learning a language, otherwise it would seem like every word has a crazy number of meanings. The example you cite ("我去让他來道歉") does not support the claim that "让" can mean "request", because it clearly is a figurative use of the "let" meaning (but English does not have such figurative usage), meaning something like "I'll go and make him to come and apologize", just like "你们都来了让我很开心" means "It makes me (i.e. lets me be) very happy that you all came".
user21820
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T10:28:58.963Z
@Puco4: If we want to say "I'll go and ask him to come and apologize", we would say "我去叫他来道歉". Of course, "我去让他來道歉" does imply the same thing, but that is something we infer from how the world works and the affirmative tone of the statement, not the literal meaning itself. To see this, compare "我只能让他來道歉" ("I can only let him come and apologize") and "我只能叫他來道歉" ("I can only ask/call him to come and apologize"), where the difference is clear.
user21820
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T11:59:46.627Z
@user253751: Well, there is no such thing as "enough tenses". Every language will have its own limitations. There are languages in which everything is marked to indicate whether it is first-hand, second-hand, or third-hand information. Does English? No. In that sense English sentences have that kind of ambiguity. But is it important? Well, it depends on whom you ask. Chinese speakers might say they don't care to have as large a spectrum of tenses as English. Sure, but it doesn't make the ambiguities disappear. Even English tenses are imperfect, as in my example: "read" can be present or past.
user21820
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T08:27:23.543Z
2020-06-24T08:27:23.543Z
user21820
<p>After some reflection, I believe my question is not completely well-posed. I think we could only compare the ambiguity in languages if they were not able to transmit all the information; but that is not the case in languages used in communication. So, as pointed in other answers, even though there exist some structures in Chinese that isolated might be &quot;ambiguous&quot;; they are able to transmit the desired information with some additional content. This additional content can be analogous, for example, to that of the verb tense in English.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a more sensible measure for comparing the languages is the <strong>information transmitted per syllable</strong> in a speech. Indeed, this was studied in the article <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Coupé, Christophe, et al. &quot;Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche.&quot; Science advances 5.9 (2019): eaaw2594</a>. Although by all means not a definitive study (they only compared 15 paragraphs texts), they obtained similar but slightly smaller values in Chinese Mandarin (6.96 bits/ syllable) than in English (7.09 bits/ syllable). Furthermore, they studied the Speech Rate (the speed at which syllables are spoken); even though this varies greatly with the speaker, on average they found a slightly lower Speech Rate in Chinese Mandarin (5.9 +- 0.6 syllables/second) than in English (6.3 +- 0.7 syllables/second). Overall, the Information Rate (the velocity at which information content is transmitted) is quite similar but again, on average, slightly lower for Mandarin (41 +- 4 bits/ second) than English (45 +- 5 bits/ second). Indeed, in the article they argue this rate is very similar across all languages and might be the most efficient rate: a higher value could be difficult to process, a slower value could be difficult to remember.</p>
<p>Below we have the Speech Rate and Information Rate for several languages (thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license of the article):</p>
<ul>
<li><p>CMN = Chinese Mandarin</p>
</li>
<li><p>ENG = English</p>
</li>
<li><p>SR = Speech Rate (syllables per second)</p>
</li>
<li><p>IR = Information Rate (bits per second)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/HcObM.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/HcObM.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T15:15:53.683Z
Really interesting follow up, nice job!
blackgreen
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T15:13:33.970Z
2020-07-06T09:08:20.260Z
2020-07-06T09:08:20.260Z
Puco4
<p>TL;DR I would say so, yes.</p>
<p>One type of ambiguity is given by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language" rel="nofollow noreferrer">isolating nature</a> of the language (i.e. absence of inflection) combined with a high frequency of homophones.</p>
<p>Which means if you hear me saying <em>bei1 ju4</em>, am I talking about a tragedy 悲剧 or glassware 杯具？This requires context to disambiguate.</p>
<p>You might think: &quot;well that's easy to disambiguate&quot;. Okay, what about you hear me saying: 我的 ji4 yi4 很差! Is it 记忆 (memory) or 技艺 (skill)?!</p>
<p>As you can see, this ambiguity exists in <em>speech only</em>. In writing, you readily identify what I'm talking about by just looking at the actual characters.</p>
<hr>
Another type of ambiguity is given by the lack of verb tenses, which makes it harder to figure out if someone is talking about a past, present or future event. This usually requires time indicators (那时候，今天，明天，去年，当时), particles or auxiliaries (过，了，将，要), or a larger frame of reference, e.g. a previous sentence.<br><br>
<p><strong>But</strong> it's possible to argue, and it's a valid argument in my opinion, that this kind of ambiguity <em>practically</em> exists only when you compare Chinese to a language with different grammatical features, and not in absolute. As your proficiency level increases, you simply <strong>get used</strong> to how the language flows.</p>
<p>And at that point the comparison with English is maybe a little moot: the two languages are just 不一样。</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Edit</strong>:
As an additional note, English itself doesn't lack weird ambiguities, apparently known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence" rel="nofollow noreferrer">garden-path sentences</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-23T21:54:50.020Z
For example: 有屍體 (there's a dead body)  and 有獅睇(there are lions to be watched)  sounds the same in Cantonese ; 冇事(no problem) and 武士 (knight) sounds the same in Cantonese
Tang Ho
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-23T22:02:34.637Z
如厠( go to the toilet)  and 魚翅  (shark fin)  sound the same in Cantonese . Now this one is funny
Tang Ho
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-23T23:22:43.903Z
More: 史料 (historical data) - 屎尿 (feces and urinate) ; 人如玉 (the person is beautiful like jade) - 人魚肉 (mermaid meat)
Tang Ho
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T09:35:48.663Z
Now I wonder how often 人魚肉 comes up in a Cantonese conversation :D
blackgreen
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T09:52:23.890Z
人魚 aka. 美人魚;  人如玉 came from a line of a poet "美人如玉劍如虹" , Again, 美人如玉 and 美人魚肉 sound the same. So, may be we can call Ariel, 美人如玉 or 美人魚肉 ?
Tang Ho
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-23T21:48:30.297Z
2020-06-24T09:52:03.960Z
2020-06-24T09:52:03.960Z
blackgreen
<p>After some time learning Chinese, I feel Chinese language is more ambiguous than English or Spanish, in the sense that a single sentence without some context can easily have multiple distinct meanings, for example, when there are characters with different meanings such as 想 with think/want/miss or 让 with let/ask (and the situation can be even worse in an oral conversation with homophone characters).</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> I would like to hear what more advanced learners or Chinese natives think about this appreciation. In particular, is it true Chinese is in general more ambiguous than English? So for the same sentence in Chinese than in English, do you usually need to provide more context in order to transmit a message?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-06-24T01:07:08.617Z
On the other hand, 'spoken' or 'written' is an important factor in this research.
dan
<translation><mandarin>
Does Chinese require more context to avoid ambiguities than English?
# Does Chinese require more context to avoid ambiguities than English?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-06-23)

After some time learning Chinese, I feel Chinese language is more ambiguous than English or Spanish, in the sense that a single sentence without some context can easily have multiple distinct meanings, for example, when there are characters with different meanings such as 想 with think/want/miss or 让 with let/ask (and the situation can be even worse in an oral conversation with homophone characters).

**Question:** I would like to hear what more advanced learners or Chinese natives think about this appreciation. In particular, is it true Chinese is in general more ambiguous than English? So for the same sentence in Chinese than in English, do you usually need to provide more context in order to transmit a message?

**Tags:** translation, mandarin

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: On the other hand, 'spoken' or 'written' is an important factor in this research.  

---

## 4 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2020-06-23. Score: 8 | Accepted answer

TL;DR I would say so, yes.

One type of ambiguity is given by the [isolating nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language) of the language (i.e. absence of inflection) combined with a high frequency of homophones.

Which means if you hear me saying *bei1 ju4*, am I talking about a tragedy 悲剧 or glassware 杯具？This requires context to disambiguate.

You might think: "well that's easy to disambiguate". Okay, what about you hear me saying: 我的 ji4 yi4 很差! Is it 记忆 (memory) or 技艺 (skill)?!

As you can see, this ambiguity exists in *speech only*. In writing, you readily identify what I'm talking about by just looking at the actual characters.

---

Another type of ambiguity is given by the lack of verb tenses, which makes it harder to figure out if someone is talking about a past, present or future event. This usually requires time indicators (那时候，今天，明天，去年，当时), particles or auxiliaries (过，了，将，要), or a larger frame of reference, e.g. a previous sentence.  
  

**But** it's possible to argue, and it's a valid argument in my opinion, that this kind of ambiguity *practically* exists only when you compare Chinese to a language with different grammatical features, and not in absolute. As your proficiency level increases, you simply **get used** to how the language flows.

And at that point the comparison with English is maybe a little moot: the two languages are just 不一样。

---

**Edit**:
As an additional note, English itself doesn't lack weird ambiguities, apparently known as [garden-path sentences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

> **Comments:**
> **username_5**: For example: 有屍體 (there's a dead body)  and 有獅睇(there are lions to be watched)  sounds the same in Cantonese ; 冇事(no problem) and 武士 (knight) sounds the same in Cantonese  
> **username_5**: 如厠( go to the toilet)  and 魚翅  (shark fin)  sound the same in Cantonese . Now this one is funny  
> **username_5**: More: 史料 (historical data) - 屎尿 (feces and urinate) ; 人如玉 (the person is beautiful like jade) - 人魚肉 (mermaid meat)  
> **username_4**: Now I wonder how often 人魚肉 comes up in a Cantonese conversation :D  
> **username_5**: 人魚 aka. 美人魚;  人如玉 came from a line of a poet "美人如玉劍如虹" , Again, 美人如玉 and 美人魚肉 sound the same. So, may be we can call Ariel, 美人如玉 or 美人魚肉 ?  

---

### Answer by username_2 on 2022-08-28. Score: 2

As a native mandarin speaker I don't quite agree with the examples by username_4 or username_3.

In my opinion 技艺 is a rather literary word that rarely, if at all, appears in speech, while 技术 is a more casual word; *colloquial speech* itself is a very important context. Moreover, 我的...很差 is a pretty casual expression. It sounds weird for a literary word to be used together with a casual expression. One either says 我的技术很差, or 我技艺不精. 技艺不精 is a quite common expression, used both in colloquial and formal language. As for 杯具, I don't remember hearing or seeing its usage ever, except as an internet slang for 悲剧. In short, homophones really don't cause much trouble for native speakers. Context *is* important, but I would hesitate to say we need *more* context. There's always some context, unless you are doing listening practice instead of actual conversation.

As for tenses, right there's no verb tense in Chinese, but that's what those time indicators are for! Let me try to translate username_3's example. I'm using 读 for read, although 看 is equally fine and more casual.

Past tenses:

I had read the book. 我当时已经读过那本书

I read the book. 我读(完)了那本书

I had been reading the book. 我当时读了那本书有一会儿了/我当时一直在读那本书

Present tenses:

I have read the book. 我读过那本书

I have been reading the book. 我读那本书有一会儿了/我最近(一直)在读那本书 If it were "I have been reading the book for 3 days" then we could simply say 我那本书读了三天了

I am reading the book. 我正在读那本书

Future tenses:

I will have read the book. 我届时会读完那本书

I will read the book. 我会读那本书

I will be reading the book. 我会在读那本书

It's always less ambiguous if the sentence includes time signal, as is often the case in real conversation. E.g., "I will have read the book by the end of this week" translates to "我这周结束前会看完那本书". In general, adding more information makes the sentence less ambiguous, and I think that's fine, unless you insist on expressing exactly the amount of information you would like to.


---

### Answer by username_3 on 2020-06-24. Score: 2

*username_4* has already mentioned ambiguity in speech. But I disagree with the notion that ambiguity in tense does not actually exist in Chinese. It does, and nothing anyone can say can eliminate it. Even if you are perfectly fluent in Chinese, it simply does not have the capability to systematically convey the same spectrum of tenses that English can.

For example, consider the following:

Past tenses:

1. I had read the book.
2. I read the book.
3. I had been reading the book.

Present tenses:

1. I have read the book.
2. I have been reading the book.
3. I am reading the book.

Future tenses:

1. I will have read the book.
2. I will read the book.
3. I will be reading the book.

In Chinese, you would likely need the wider context to tell you even whether it is in the past, present or future, but even the context may not tell you clearly which exact tense it is. For example, you might think that you can say "I had read the book" using "我已读了那本书" (assuming it is clear from the context that this is in the past). Sure, but can you easily distinguish between "I have been reading the book" and "I am reading the book"? In practice, the context will tell you the temporal order of events, but in Chinese we often do not convey specific information about the grammatical aspect, whereas English grammar requires specifying that.

In general, I believe most of the difference in precision between English and Chinese stems from the fact that English has a significantly more complicated grammar than Chinese, which enables higher precision at the cost of being more rigid.

Vocabulary wise, there may not be much difference because in any natural language many common verbs and nouns have multiple meanings and require the context to disambiguate. For instance, "想" does mean "think" or "think of", where "think of" can be used to convey "miss", and you can be more precise by choosing "想念". I don't know why you think "让" means "ask", because it doesn't. (If it does in some dialect, it is like people incorrectly writing "would of" instead of "would have" and "their" instead of "they're" due to hearing them pronounced similarly but not having learnt correct English.)

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: The point of my remark "that ambiguity in tense does not actually exist in Chinese" is that these ambiguities exist only comparatively, and not in absolute. They do exist, as your examples nicely show, *when you compare Chinese to a language with different grammatical features*. But at the end of the day, when two natives talk these ambiguities slide out of the picture, because the only framework is the one language they are using right now, which is (hopefully) self-consistent.  
> **username_0**: Ah, I am just learning chinese and in a lesson they said 让 can mean *to ask* as in a request sense [as explained in this post](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/39694/25265).  
> **username_0**: @username_4 my question was a little bit about whether do you usually need to systematically provide more context in a sentence in chinese than the corresponding sentence in English to remove these ambiguities. Though as you say, maybe the information content is the same in both languages, in English you provide the context through the verb tense, etc. and in Chinese through additional structures.  
> **username_3**: @username_4: Thanks for clarifying your point. Certainly, if two people only know the same one language, they are typically unaware of most ambiguities that are clear from external perspective. However, some ambiguities are really obvious. For example every English speaker knows that "you" can be ambiguous since it serves as both the singular and plural. They hence might choose some phrasings to eliminate such ambiguity. Other ambiguities such as fine distinctions of tense may be much less obvious, in line with your "slide out of the picture" remark.  
> **username_4**: @username_0 *maybe the information content is the same in both languages* yes, this is, more or less, what I wanted to say. The **number of morphemes** seems close, even though I'm not able to substantiate this claim with data. It's just my subjective perception. -> username_3 I agree with you +1  
> **username_3**: @username_0: I think you must try to differentiate between literal and figurative senses when learning a language, otherwise it would seem like every word has a crazy number of meanings. The example you cite ("我去让他來道歉") does not support the claim that "让" can mean "request", because it clearly is a figurative use of the "let" meaning (but English does not have such figurative usage), meaning something like "I'll go and make him to come and apologize", just like "你们都来了让我很开心" means "It makes me (i.e. lets me be) very happy that you all came".  
> **username_3**: @username_0: If we want to say "I'll go and ask him to come and apologize", we would say "我去叫他来道歉". Of course, "我去让他來道歉" does imply the same thing, but that is something we infer from how the world works and the affirmative tone of the statement, not the literal meaning itself. To see this, compare "我只能让他來道歉" ("I can only let him come and apologize") and "我只能叫他來道歉" ("I can only ask/call him to come and apologize"), where the difference is clear.  
> **username_3**: @user253751: Well, there is no such thing as "enough tenses". Every language will have its own limitations. There are languages in which everything is marked to indicate whether it is first-hand, second-hand, or third-hand information. Does English? No. In that sense English sentences have that kind of ambiguity. But is it important? Well, it depends on whom you ask. Chinese speakers might say they don't care to have as large a spectrum of tenses as English. Sure, but it doesn't make the ambiguities disappear. Even English tenses are imperfect, as in my example: "read" can be present or past.  

---

### Answer by username_0 on 2020-06-24. Score: 2

After some reflection, I believe my question is not completely well-posed. I think we could only compare the ambiguity in languages if they were not able to transmit all the information; but that is not the case in languages used in communication. So, as pointed in other answers, even though there exist some structures in Chinese that isolated might be "ambiguous"; they are able to transmit the desired information with some additional content. This additional content can be analogous, for example, to that of the verb tense in English.

On the other hand, a more sensible measure for comparing the languages is the **information transmitted per syllable** in a speech. Indeed, this was studied in the article [Coupé, Christophe, et al. "Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche." Science advances 5.9 (2019): eaaw2594](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594). Although by all means not a definitive study (they only compared 15 paragraphs texts), they obtained similar but slightly smaller values in Chinese Mandarin (6.96 bits/ syllable) than in English (7.09 bits/ syllable). Furthermore, they studied the Speech Rate (the speed at which syllables are spoken); even though this varies greatly with the speaker, on average they found a slightly lower Speech Rate in Chinese Mandarin (5.9 +- 0.6 syllables/second) than in English (6.3 +- 0.7 syllables/second). Overall, the Information Rate (the velocity at which information content is transmitted) is quite similar but again, on average, slightly lower for Mandarin (41 +- 4 bits/ second) than English (45 +- 5 bits/ second). Indeed, in the article they argue this rate is very similar across all languages and might be the most efficient rate: a higher value could be difficult to process, a slower value could be difficult to remember.

Below we have the Speech Rate and Information Rate for several languages (thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license of the article):

* CMN = Chinese Mandarin
* ENG = English
* SR = Speech Rate (syllables per second)
* IR = Information Rate (bits per second)

[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/HcObM.jpg)](https://i.sstatic.net/HcObM.jpg)

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: Really interesting follow up, nice job!  

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