Comments on: Why Do Japanese People Talk So Fast?

By: Nelson Rodrigues

Nelson Rodrigues — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 11:11:00 +0000

As a portuguese person, Japanese doesn’t seem that fast to me.

By: MavsWorld

MavsWorld — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 20:17:00 +0000

Another interesting difference between English and Japanese is that Japanese is a syllable timed language (well mora timed), whilst English is a stress timed language. Therefore, speaking quickly in English is different to speaking quickly in Japanese.

By: Vert

Vert — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 08:49:00 +0000

Koichi, I think I love you; this article will forever remain in my mind because you used Big Lebowski pictures and quotes. I'll never be able to watch the movie again without thinking about Japanese. What an interesting thought... plagiarismdetect

By: Lava Yuki

Lava Yuki — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:16:00 +0000

I always thought u had to say more in english, since we have to include personal pronouns and all the particles to sound fluent. While in Japanese, u leave out pronouns and can sometimes omit certain particles. U can even get away with just saying the verb!

By: Judith

Judith — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:23:00 +0000

I’m from South Africa, ie the Southern Hemisphere. Unfortunately I can only speak two languages: English and Afrikaans (a derivative of Dutch) so I can’t attest to any of the native African languages. My gut feel would be that in the south English is spoken slower than in the north (where I am from), but Afrikaans is spoken faster.

By: Anthony ONeal

Anthony ONeal — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 22:35:00 +0000

How is “information” being defined? Your analysis also runs afoul of the “Standard Average European” problem. It seems to contain a lot of languages, which makes Japanese look like an outlier among languages. It would’ve been more interesting if, instead of including 5 different related Indo-European languages, they had included more languages from other groups. For instance, Japanese is Altaic and Agglutanative, it’s actually related to Turkish. If another Altaic language, such as Turkish or Mongolian had been included, we could maybe have some greater insight into whether their metrics disadvantage such kinds of languages, or whether Japanese was truly alone.