[japgolly]

That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement.

- Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables

- Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially)

What about written length? You can see the Japanese sentence is a little longer here (when the English uses a non-monospaced font). It's also enough to demonstrates the why using kanji doesn't always provide the huge reduction/compression that you're expecting.

- Why's it so hot today?

- なんでこんなに暑いの今日？

[cambalache]

> Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length?

Do you understand than 1 kana represents 1 syllable? They are BY DEFINITION, more concise than Latin letters.

[japgolly]

Wow thanks! I didn't understand that despite being able to read and write Japanese! Sarcasm aside you don't seem to have a very deep understanding so maybe you should be a bit nicer when expressing your opinion.

> 1 kana represents 1 syllable

ちゅ <-- 2 kana, 1 syllable

> BY DEFINITION, more concise than Latin letters

smash <-- 1 syllable, 5 latin letters, ~3 kana in length スマッシュ <-- 5 kana

[fyolnish]

Why’s it so hot today?

何でこんなに暑いの今日？

Where in the US are you from?

出身は米国の何処ですか?

Japanese sentences are usually shorter than the english translation.

[Jach]

For paid translations, English likes to charge by the word, whereas Japanese charges by the character. The rule of thumb for conversion is 2 JP characters --> 1 English word i.e. translating a 1000 character JP document you'll expect about 500 EN words at the end.

[s1300045]

I speak Mandarin Chinese. They are kind of similar.

今天怎麼這麼熱？

美國那來的？