Question for bilingual people: is English the fastest language to type/write in?

Question for bilingual people: is English the fastest language to type or wite in, i.e. objectively the best language?

If you only had 1 hour to write an school exam, would you be able to pack in as much information if it was in French, Hindi or Cantonese than if it was in English?

Reply 1

MindMax2000

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by A Rolling Stone

I don't think it's entirely a fair comparison.

Take Hindi or Chinese; these keyboards use completely different alphabets and the words use completely different writing to the alphabet we use for Romantic, Scandinavian, or Germanic languages.

English keyboard is probably the fastest, but that's probably the one I am most familiar with. It's like asking whether a French person or French Canadian would find it faster to type in French or English; it's more likely French because it's the language they are most used to.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the most widely recognised keyboard layout (QWERTY layout) is one that was initially designed to slow typing down as much as possible. So arguably, you're going to be slow in almost any language.

Furthermore, if you are typing in a language that doesn't use the English based alphabet, you're going to use a completely different type of keyboard layout i.e. you can't write Hindi or Chinese using an English alphabet - they have a different keyboard layout for that, even though they can use the same keyboard.

Reply 2

kijeta

as a "polyglot", I find typing english the fastest, purely because pretty much all of my internet activity is conducted in english.

I type chinese slower (per word), but because chinese condenses information much more heavily, I convey roughly the same units of information in either language.

french words are generally longer and therefore would take more time to type.

unfortunately, I do not know steganography, but if I did, I would be able to type english much faster