|
 |
Languages that work best for Twitter | ||
Tags: Social Network | Internet | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 1 of 9 30 March 2012 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I saw this in the Economist today Which tongues work best for microblogs?. The article describes how Mandarin is ideal for tweeting- Twitter is banned in China, but they have an analog to it.
"Chinese (is) ideal for micro-blogs, which typically restrict messages to 140 symbols. Though Twitter, with 140m active users the world’s best-known microblogging service, is blocked in China, Sina Weibo, a local variant, has over 250m users. Chinese is so succinct that most messages never reach that limit, says Shuo Tang, who studies social media at the University of Indiana." The article has an interesting character study graph: 
8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6641 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 9 30 March 2012 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I knew I wasn't the only one! Word length tends to be higher in Spanish which doesn't surprise me, but the really amusing thing to ponder is just how much more you could fit into 140 characters in Chinese than in English.
Just to extract a sentence from my Mandarin textbook, there's an example sentence that they translate as "You should watch less television and pay more attention to your schoolwork." With spaces and punctuation, that turns out to 75 characters. That same sentence as given in Chinese consists of 13 characters, a savings of 82.67%. You wouldn't even be able to repeat that sentence once in English, yet you could write it out ten times in Chinese before reaching the limit. I imagine it would be quite hard to reach the limit of 140 characters in Chinese, whereas in English the limit really pushes a person to use their creativity and imagination to express themselves in a small amount of space. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 3 of 9 30 March 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Korean Hangul works well for Twitter also since each "character" is one syllable, not one letter. A single Korean syllable block can contain anywhere from 2 to 5 letters inside, which makes it quite dense. Some of the accounts I follow will post a tweet in Korean and in English and the Korean version is either significantly shorter or contains quite a bit more info (or sometimes both).
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5032 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 4 of 9 30 March 2012 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||
|
How does Japanese compare? With the kanji and kana, I imagine it's also very efficient.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4697 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 5 of 9 31 March 2012 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
|
It's interesting that French is comparable to other languages, despite it's longwinded spelling.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4699 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 6 of 9 31 March 2012 at 3:53am | IP Logged | ||
|
Japanese is quite efficient. I can tweet half a novel without reaching the limit. Well, not quite, but I usually don't need all the space. 140 is more than enough.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 7 of 9 31 March 2012 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
It should be pretty similar to Korean and Chinese. Kana is one syllable per character except for ん / ン (-n), however Kanji can represent more than 1 syllable for certain Japanese readings (unlike Chinese and Korean which seem to only have single syllable readings). Edited by Warp3 on 31 March 2012 at 4:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6947 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 8 of 9 02 April 2012 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
|
Occasionally I'll try to tweet the same message in English and Japanese. In Japanese I
can almost write a mini-essay and go into detail about what I want to say, but when I translate the same message into English, I start with what I think is a pithy, minimalist rendering of my original message, which ends up still being over the character limit so I have to keep paring it down further and further, and sometimes it's a challenge to fit in even the barebones essentials of my intended message. This is how extreme I feel the disparity is. Here's a recent example of a tweet I wrote in both languages: JAPANESE (140 characters) 発展途上国の人々がビジネスを作って経済的 な自立を達成できるように、お金を貸すNPOで す。チャリティーよりは長期 的な ベネフィットになって、しかもちゃんとお金 が返ってくる！今無料で$25のローンができる お試しキャンペーン中。 http://kiva.org/i/N0sOI5Hgp42 @Kivaさんから (Translation: This is an NPO that lets you lend money to people in developing countries so they can start businesses and become financially independent. It provides a more long-term benefit than charity, and yes, you get the money back! They're now offering free $25 trial loans.)http://kiva.org/i/N0sOI5Hgp42 @Kivaさんから ENGLISH (89 characters - After a long struggle I gave up trying to fit in a second sentence.) Join @Kiva: Get $25 free trial and help alleviate poverty. http://kiva.org/i/N0sOI5Hgp42 @Kivaさんから It can actually be quite time-consuming to have to keep editing and rearranging my message to fit within the character limit, so when I just want to write what's on my mind without targeting a particular audience, I'll go for Japanese almost every time. Edited by Lucky Charms on 02 April 2012 at 10:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
