Apparently, it’s the fastest language in the world. That’s what [one study](https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/language-speed#:~:text=There%20unfortunately%20have) found anyway. Spanish being the runners up, though just barely. Japanese being 7.84 syllables per second, Spanish having 7.82. I listen to people speak, I can definitely hear it sometimes, other times no. Like I could hear speed in ‘Alice in borderlands’ but in old movies like Ikiru not really. I know way more Spanish, and for me the speed is my biggest hurdle. Obviously, it varies from person to person. Watching Money Heist, I find Berlin much easier to understand than Denver or Arturo. I know less about Japanese dialects, but Spain spanish they skip a lot of syllables. Like “donde estas?” sounds like “On tas”.
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Most anime I feel I can keep up with fairly well most of the time but I’ve watched Samurai Gourmet on Netflix and that was a lot harder to keep up with
Without other studies, they definitely speak fast. I always wondered if it’s a habit created to cover up mistakes from the mora system (long vowel = pronounced longer.)
Reminds me of Spanish and Parisian French. Was surprised to not see French on the list, but it is more a Northern French thing and African French is pretty mellow overall.
Japanese has very few consonant clusters and a lot of vowels, so it’s faster to say.
If you think of an English word like ‘stretch’, that is a comparatively long syllable because it has a 5 to 1 consonant/vowel ratio. On the other hand, a Japanese word like ‘konnichiwa’ has a 5 to 4 consonant/vowel ratio, so you are cramming a lot more syllables in.
I can see that. Sometimes I can read and understand a sentence but when the same thing is spoken I get totally lost sometimes haha
No. I’ve never noticed. But with an extremely restrictive phonetic system you probably need more syllables on average to say the same thing.
This statistics is useless. Japanese has almost only CV or V syllables. Of course they will speak them faster, because they are simply shorter.
[I posted about this not too long ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s01bi7/anyone_know_the_efficiency_of_japanese_compared/hs02qes/), but basically I don’t believe it makes much sense to count syllables and conclude one language is spoken faster than another, which is what that ranking is based on. Japanese syllables are basically all CV (consonant-vowel), while English syllables can pack a lot more sounds in its syllables (CVC, CCV, CCVC, CCCV, etc.). [Here’s a more complete list with examples of what I mean](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable). So it’s not surprising to see Japanese top these kind of lists considering Japanese syllables are simpler/shorter. This [Speech tempo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_tempo#Between-language_differences) article also goes into it.
But since you also asked for opinions, hmm… I don’t really feel a noticeable difference myself. I mean, it’s tough to say because when learning a new language it always feels like natives are speaking unreasonably fast but that’s completely normal and it eventually fades away with enough practice. Then eventually you can even listen to podcasts and such at 1.5x or 2x speed like you could with your native language.
In any case, even if there were a way to compare language speeds reliably and a difference was found, I really wouldn’t expect it to be much. I expect way, way more variance among individuals (slow talkers vs. fast talkers) in a single language than there is between languages.
I think it’s not very meaningful to measure it in syllables. From a Japanese perspective, a language like English is spoken fast. The word “straight,” for example, will count as one syllable, but to unfamiliar Japanese ears its 4 or 5 bits of sound all jammed together, which sounds very fast. “s” “t” “re” “i” “t.” In terms of how people actually speak, I don’t feel like Japanese is fast. It just has a different rhythm. So I guess it just depends on how you break up the sounds into units.
I’m in the same boat as you, better at Spanish than Japanese. Although your explanation of Money Heist turning “donde estas” to “on tas” just explained why I literally couldn’t understand any of that show… it wasn’t langauge failure, it was not being used to the dialect 🙂
I mean… faster in general? I’m not sure I’d agree. But…
1) They omit subjects or major parts of sentences if the meaning is clear.
2) Many Japanese people abbreviate greetings the more they know someone. Not necessarily closeness, but if you work with someone for a couple of weeks it’ll be “ohayou gozaimasu” and assuming you’re both around the same age group it’ll go to “ohayou” to “mumblemasu” to eventually “ssss”. Sometimes I wonder if they’re a snake race. 😉
In my opinion as a phonetician, it’s not a matter of opinion, it’s something you can objectively measure in terms of syllables per second. The study you link to sucks donkey dongs because of their sample size and the poor quality of the utterances they elicited, but it could be redone to answer your question.
While the other posters have some good points about syllable structure and the restriction on (most) consonant clusters, I don’t think it necessarily follows that a language with few consonant clusters will naturally be any faster than a language with more. Homorganic clusters (those using the same organ, e.g. the tongue tip) will put physical limitations on articulation rate, but glides like /kj/ and clusters like /pl/ or /br/ wouldn’t necessarily limit the speed that your mouth meats can move.
One interesting angle from information sciences is the idea of information quantity, the amount of information carried by each segment or syllable. People have postulated that languages with omnisyllabic tone (like Mandarin) or phonation differences (like Khmer) can pack more information into each syllable, and thus we’d expect slower speech to allow the listener to pick up everything the speaker is putting down. AFAIK that’s just a hypothesis, though, and not something that’s been addressed experimentally.
It always feels too fast for me. I’ve been stuck for years now without listening getting any easier.
I feel like after learning the language for so long it no longer sounds really fast to me.
Most languages that you don’t understand sound really fast.
I’m not asked to answer this, but from Japanese stand point, English sounded crazy fast until I get hang of how the pronunciations are handled, how it’s meddled in and where people puts emphasis on pronunciation and tones within grammatical structure and within each words. Once I learned how to speak in very well articulated manner, along with getting used to pronunciation conventions, it finally sounds closer to normal speed.
edit: Pronouncing entirely different language English in regular speed was super hard because the way I try to pronounce was wrong, or inefficient in a way. It was like I’m looking at other people running on hurdle track wondering why others run super fast while I’m lagging because I’m jumping 10 feet when the hurdle itself is only 3 feet. There are certain ways in which we all cut corners to pronounce those while maintaining punctuations and make it just clear enough to be understood, and that’s considered standard way each language is spoken anyways. My tongue still trips here and there, but it became easier to speak as my tongue started to get used to it, and then finally it also became easy to keep up with the regular speed. And I assume it works the similar way in your case.
[Yes, research shows it has among the highest syllables per second](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-some-languages-spoken-faster-than-others)
I remember watching something on this. Apparently Japanese is inefficient at transferring meaning so people speak faster (this tends to happen in other languages too).
Not sure I 100% agree with that. Formal Japanese is long but informal Japanese is short.
It seems you haven’t been in greece haha.
In my opinion, not really.
Japanese is not fast. It’s easy to catch what they’re trying to say and on the other hand korean is way too spoken fast
Japanese is the fastest recorded language. It has an average of 7.84 syllables per second. Spanish is just behind Japanese with 7.82 syllable per second. English only has 6.19 syllables per second .Mandarin is rather slow with only 5.18 syllables spoken per second on average according to the interwebs.
information density is high in japanese so I’d imagine it’s usually spoken more slowly than spanish to account for this.
If you want to test your listening ability vs. fast speaking, check out Talking Blues by Furutachi Ichiro.
https://youtu.be/i3buPppsQBg
Well, my native language is Spanish so I don’t that japanese is that fast
maybe it has to do with me speaking many syllable based languages, but i really dont think japanese is spoken all that fast…spanish is faster for me still, especially when it’s a dialect like dominican spanish, where lots of letters are cut, which makes it faster