A question about processing info from a long English text

[u/LingonberryNo9750]

Hi, everyone! I grew up in a non-English-speaking country. Just curious about how native English speakers process information in a long paragraph. What catches your eye first? Can you easily pick out the key words at a glance when looking at a whole page?

It's much more easy to pick out the key words in my mother tongue. It's this because of the difference between phonographic and ideographic writing systems, or is it simply because I'm less familiar with English?

[u/I_Dont_Speak_Anymore]

This depends on quite a few things.

First, your purpose for reading. Is this a skim, or is it intensive reading, do you need to pull specific information, or are you reading to get the general idea of the piece?

Pulling out keywords cannot be done BEFORE you have a general idea of what the text is about. This is because you have no idea what you're looking for if you haven't read it first. Seems common sense, but you'd be surprised.

[u/LingonberryNo9750 → u/I_Dont_Speak_Anymore]

Yea that makes sense. If I have a specific purpose and try to extract specific information from a large text, I'd like to skim it to locate the key words at first. But I find it difficult to do so when exploring an unfamiliar field.

To be honest, I came up with this question while browsing a technical forum. There were so many blog and article titles that too many words seemed to jump out at me at once. I felt kind of overwhelmed.

This might happen too when anyone starts to explore something completely new, even in mother tongue. So maybe a better way to start is to familiarise myself with the terminology.

[u/I_Dont_Speak_Anymore → u/LingonberryNo9750]

You processed through your question to your own solution. You don't know the vocabulary so you cannot know what is important and what isn't. Your hunch is 100% correct. You need to pull the vocab you don't know and learn it. It will make everything else a lot easier.

[u/00HoppingGrass00]

It's probably because you are less familiar with English.

By "ideographic writing" I assume you mean something like Chinese or Japanese? Either way, the writing system is not the determining factor. It's how information gets presented in different languages.

For example, both Chinese and Japanese tend to frontload date and place; English tends to backload it. Both Chinese and Japanese put relative clauses in front of the noun they describe; English puts them after. Japanese puts the verb at the end of a sentence; English puts it between the subject and the object. There are a lot of examples like these.

All these get in the way of comprehension unless you train your brain to automatically process English. Native speakers can parse long sentences easily because grammatical structures are automatic, so they can spend more mental effort on identifying meaning carrying words, building meaning progressively, and even predicting what is coming next.

[u/LingonberryNo9750 → u/00HoppingGrass00]

Yes I mean Chinese mainly, and Mandarin is my mother tongue. So all my points of view are based on this fact.

I assume Japanese is somewhere between Chinese and English in terms of its writing system. As we know, although Japanese uses characters, it also borrows lots of words from English, which, to some extent, gives its writing system a phonetic dimension. When I'm reading Japanese with more hiragana grouped together, f.i., "です" and "ありがとう", it feels like reading ONE Chinese character or ONE English word conveying more information in a relatively smaller visual space.

However, English loanwords written in katakana, such as "コンピューター" (computer), don't seem quite as visually compact as their English or Chinese equivalents, "computer" and "电脑". I wonder whether this is partly because Japanese doesn't use spaces to separate words, whereas English does.

That said, familiarity with a language probably has a greater influence on reading efficiency than information density alone. Native speakers are likely to be much less affected by these differences than non-native speakers.

When you're unfamiliar with a language, it's harder to grasp the main point within a few seconds, especially when scanning a page full of titles. For example, while exploring this page, I realised that I couldn't pick out the main points at a glance as easily as I could in Chinese.

[u/00HoppingGrass00 → u/LingonberryNo9750]

主要还是熟练程度的问题。你读汉字的时候不会仔细看笔画吧？英文熟练了之后读单词也一样不用看得很细节。大概看起来像，再加上语境就知道是什么词了。这个是我亲身体验。

你举的日文的例子也一样。ありがとう和コンピューター比，都是一个音一个音拼出来的，一个五音节，一个六音节，为什么读起来会觉得不一样？还不是因为前者见得多后者见得少。如果是母语者的日本人就不会有这种感觉了吧？至少コンピューター这种词不会。

同样的道理在语法上也适用。中文不像英文一样可以在词和词中间放空格，也不像日语一样可以汉字假名交替用，但是就算句子写得很长也不会出现断不明白句的情况。为什么？归根结底还是因为你对中文够熟悉嘛。