The information density of ‘two dudes talking’ or any unscripted format is very low, so it time-compresses well. Specific podcasts, typically scripted monologues with technical content, such as Causality [0] (recommended!), I need to listen to much slower. Ditto if it is in an accent which isn’t mine, which slows my comprehension. I also slow the speed if I’m driving. So, yes, it takes mental overhead, but is doable. Go one click at a time and it will feel natural.
Don’t get me started on writing. My letters will often transition halfway into a letter thats 3 words ahead.
But what you said made me curious. I listened to this podcast at 3x. I was able to understand all the words, but my conceptual understanding decreased. I also have to listen actively -- not passively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SFkwdm0PP0
At 4x, I could only understand the shape of the sentences but could no longer make out the words. But I turned on the captions and found I could keep up. Turns out reading at 4x works, listening at 4x doesn't.
English is also spoken with different prosodies and cadences. For instance, I can understand Singaporean English perfectly, but it's less amenable to being sped up. I tried listening to this lecture in Singaporean English in 3x and found that I could barely understand it.
PS. I wonder if, even peripheralally, having one of 'em newfangled AI glasses teleprompting you at the same time, could get one up to 2.0x or higher.-
Eminem's song "Rap God" has a segment where he goes at about 6 words per second (@4m23s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohDycgc-H8
However, there is a difference between a rehearsed and practiced performance and communication that makes these things more a feat of acrobatics.
* FedEx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M
* Micro Machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzd11GMBONg
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" (Adriano Celentano)
Japanese is definitely a faster spoken language than French, but French words tend to be a lot more verbose and packed with meaning. For Japanese speakers to communicate as much meaning as French speakers, they would need to speak faster.
I cannot wait for independent replication!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971274_A_cross-L...
This was also bounded by a reading task, so the performance shown per language could be influenced by the average reading skills of people who speak those languages. They also asked them to pronounce differently than they normally would.
If you take the 17 languages they tested and get the average between them, you get 39bits/s. For English and French, the information rate they recorded was higher, with an average closer to ~45bits/s (just eyeballing their chart). Their results also showed Thai at ~35bits/s. A 10bits/s swing from median to median is pretty huge.
From the paper:
"We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the aforementioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors"
"Together, our findings show that while there is wide interspeaker variation in speech and IRs (information rates), this variation is also structured by language. This means that an individual’s speech behavior is not entirely due to individual characteristics but is further constrained by the language being spoken."
"However, languages seem to stably inhabit an optimal range of IRs, away from the extremes that can still be available to individual speakers. Languages achieve this balance through a trade-off between ID (information density) and SR (syllable rate), resulting in a narrower distribution of IRs compared to SRs. In the introduction, we rhetorically asked whether too low or too high an IR would impede communicative and/or cognitive efficiency. Our results here suggest that the answer to both questions is positive and that human communication seems to avoid two extreme sociolinguistic profiles: on the one hand, high ID languages spoken fast by their speakers (“high-fast”), and, on the other, low ID languages spoken slowly by their speakers (“low-slow”)."
Are simultaneous translator’s brains different? They need to process two languages at once, and I never could do that even though I’m fluent in more than one language.
Translating is a completely different skill that you have to train on top of being fluent in more than one language. The way I translate is by sort of forgetting something in one language and then remembering it in another. It's a slow and awkward process but I suspect if I did this for like a thousand hours hearing something and then repeating it in another language would be as easy as switching the language in which I'm thinking. I think the real difficulty of simultaneous translation comes from having to speak while you're listening. Consider recording your response to an audio message while listening to it, that would also be very difficult but there is only one language involved.
Professionals in a field very often communicate much faster with each other because so much stuff is a standard state plus deviations from that, whereas the person who doesn't know the field can't compress it like that. It's been studied with chess--good chess players are better at memorizing *sensible* board positions, but lose most of that advantage when confronted with nonsense.
>Each participant read aloud 15 identical passages that had been translated into their mother tongue. After noting how long the speakers took to get through their readings, the researchers calculated an average speech rate per language, measured in syllables/second.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20880789
There is that stereotype that french-speaking Swiss people speak slower than French ones. In my experience I find it valid, but maybe I am wrong.
If this is accurate, I am wondering if Swiss people transmit information at the same rate as French people.
It could be that they use more precise words on average, that convey more information, even if spoken more slowly, and keeping transmission rate identical. Or that body language, intonations are richer (non verbal).
Or the spoken transmission rate may actually be slower, but as the article describes, bottleneck is about structuring the ideas, and Swiss speakers, on average, may be more efficient/deliberate at that, instinctively/culturally.
I don't have enough experience speaking with Swiss nationals to verify my anecdotal theories... if anyone can chime in...
Tangentially, I'm relatively confident that what you're experience has provided you is simply confirmation bias. Unless French is not their first language.
Maybe I am racist, but I am not sure how the speed at which one speaks is a racist trope. I sure do not look down on the Swiss, they're a pretty successful nation.
Question for you: what is your relative confidence based on?
On the positive, your comment invited me to check Wikipedia and I was surprised to see there are actually studies about some of this. They seem to confirm the stereotype. Belgian and Parisian seem to have a higher syllable/ms rate than several Swiss counties, with some caveats. [1]
But no, it does not talk about total information bitrate, that is much more subjective. Maybe if you are a "frontalier" and have some anecdotal experience with it, I'm curious.
[1] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_de_Suisse
"Après examen des différentes études, le stéréotype des Suisses qui articulent plus lentement que les Parisiens est confirmé, à quelques exceptions près"
i would take the results too seriously.
edit: If I hear a case that is not insane as to how the numbers could somehow determine themselves (through bad math) or be p-hacked, I'd happily consider it. Instead people are acting like taking sentences of equivalent meaning and counting the syllables to determine information density is somehow laughably naïve.
CamperBob2•6mo ago
Guessing there's something very fundamental that the author misunderstands about Morse code.
kevingadd•6mo ago
Of course, if you know both ends are computers you can just transmit in some other encoding at a much higher rate.
selcuka•6mo ago
Yes, spaces are part of the morse code spec. It looks like a binary encoding but in fact it's ternary.
We can invent a 5-bit (or 6-bit, to include numbers and punctuation) morse-like code to avoid needing spaces.
CamperBob2•6mo ago
Historically the metric for Morse code is words per minute. Morse is similar to a Huffman code where common letters are allocated fewer elements, so it's not very meaningful to talk about "bits per second" with respect to Morse even if you do specify the number of words per minute. The number of "bits" will vary based on the letters being transmitted.
Tadpole9181•6mo ago
A skilled operator is around 30 WPM. The average English word is 5 (rounded up) characters. Add one character for the space. That's 180 characters per minute, or 3 character per second. With 37 characters available in morse code, that's log_2(37) or 5.2 bits per charater.
So 15.6 bits per second. Just under half of the 39 bits they got for speech, like they said.
Nevermark•6mo ago
That wasn't contested.
spinf97•6mo ago
vvoid•6mo ago
The faster the information comes at you, the less important any particular bit is, because you have more context with which to autocorrect.