I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly.
Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed.
What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar.
The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.
I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use.
As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.
Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed.
What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.
I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use.
As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.