The slippery slope of Chinese

So why should we care about the rate at which a certain author introduces new Chinese characters in a book? Because of mental bandwidth.

I read this idea in a fantastic book called Scarcity, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.

In this post I’m going to try to expand their idea so that it applies to vocabularies.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

I am basing this post on the ideas put forward by the extensive reading researchers.

My simplified understanding of extensive reading is the following: if you understand most of the text, you can learn new words by context.

What does “most of the text” mean? Roughly 99%.

How fast can you learn new words? You can learn a new word when you encounter it 7 times in different, comprehensible contexts.

This comprehension constraint is very strict: if the unknown words reach 3 per cent, you can no longer understand the text.

So, a book that introduces vocabulary more slowly is less demanding on the mental bandwidth of the reader, whereas a difficult book does not.

Questions that remain unanswered: can you show me the slope of a book?

I will refine this posts with references and graphs in the future.