Specifically, if your first language is: French, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Dutch (etc…) you will eventually attain a high proficiency in English after prolonged exposure and study. If your first language is Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, you will only rarely attain a high proficiency in English, even after prolonged exposure and study.

My observation is based on the professors in the US. They are the ones who did doctoral degrees in English speaking countries, have published tons of articles/books in English and have been teaching and living in the US for many many years. Yet, they still have problems in English – they lack the ability to use English at ease in speaking situations and even their written communication seems weak sometimes. And in terms of English proficiency, they are dwarfed by their counterparts whose first languages are French, Spanish…
In colloquims, Chinese/Japanese/Korean professors seldom participate in spontaneous asking/answering. And I suspect it is because of linguistic deficiency.

I have no explanation for this. But this is very depressing to me. I have been discussing this with other people and they agree with my observation.

I have been told that many European countries extensively import English TV programs and that they put subtitles (instead of dubbing). This has been offered as an explanation for why Dutch, Swedish, etc.. people have a scary command of English. But this cannot be the only explanation as I have also been told that in France they do dub foreign language programs…

The explanation may lie in the brain – in the form of neural commitment or whatever. But I don’t know. And whatever it is I suspect may explain the reading speed differences you’ve observed.

Anyway, the size of my experiments is too small to prove anything conclusively, I wonder if there are studies available somewhere.

Meimei, you are right that usually more information fits into one page with characters than with latin letters, although this depends on the choice of formatting, Chinese books and websites tend to have much less empty spaces and less space between the lines, they look very cluttered (at least to my Western eye).

In any case, to fairly measure which of the 2 writing systems fits more info into a given space, you would need to asign some font and spacing that provided the same level of “confort” to the reader, which is a difficult thing to measure.

Back to the reading speed: I have measured it using books that I have in both Chiense and English editions. My test book was Obama’s “audacity”, and I selected a passage that looked like it was a very accurate translation (but there again, this is debatable).

The question is: can this speed be improved with practice, and if yes, with how much practice. To the first question I am pretty sure the answe is yes, because I see some improvement im myself in the past few months. To the 2nd question I have no idea, since I do not know any foreigner who reads Chinese as fast as the Chinese.

Wukailong is clearly one good step ahead of me in reading abilities, but I hope that after a few more months reading books I will be able to catch up