It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since.
That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
And if we look at stuff like the PISA scores, it doesn't seem like this supposed higher rate of reading is paying many dividends.
> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:
1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.
2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.
Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?
This plus a text-to-speech/audiobook feature with autoscrolling would probably do a lot for book consumption (I mean I, for one, would sign up for that waitlist)
You and I both, but come on. Do we really want to compare HN readership numbers to TikTok's viewership?
Walk around in the subway someday and count, out of 100 people, how many are reading on their phone vs scrolling. I have not seen a person read an article or book on their phone in ages.
Yes they exist but even Google is making it harder to find content to read by burying text-based pages below AI summaries and video results.
Most places where people do their weekly groceries in Spain have at least a small book section if not a bookstore by the entrance. It's a typical thing to bring over to the beach or a weekend trip that doesn't matter if it gets damaged or lost.
Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.
> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc.
It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit.
Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's not odd to presume a printed book is going to be of higher quality than a webpage.
You are describing monetization quality, not content quality.
Printing has its moat, yes, which better protects it from copying, and process of consuming from interruptions, and creates payment in advance situation. Printing houses produce enormous amounts of cliche-by-cliche semi-porn "romantic novels", and various sensationalist garbage, and earn money without suffocating dependency on Google, FB and such. Good for them.
Even low-quality books have words people might not know. I often find people who don't read books (physical or eBook) have a much lower vocabulary, and they typically don't value vocabulary, which as an avid reader, I find weird, but I guess to each their own.
Yeah sadly let’s not kid ourselves, most people on their phone on the subway (in the USA) are watching very low quality short form video content. Or they’re reading gossip subreddits or something. If you want to really scare yourself go check out what teachers have to say about the current crop of students and their literacy rates.
We should 100% ban all smart devices for people under 18. Not just in schools but entirely. Middle schoolers literally can’t spell their own names, or words like “want” and “cat”. I would have assumed some of the teachers were pearl-clutching but it’s not just a few of them saying this, it’s all of them, including my own mom who I trust a lot.
>That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.
I´ve ended up switching back to paper for half of my reading. Kids prefer paper for reading to. Kindle goes with me on vacation when I don´t want to drag around 2-3 kilos of paper (Reading chunky history books at the moment).
The original article is comparing "a 2023 study showing that only 16% of Americans read for pleasure in a given day, down from the (already low) number of 28% in 2004" with "the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025".
I think a big part of the discrepancy probably comes from the different time frames. If you ask somebody who reads for pleasure once a week whether they did so on a given day, they'll say yes 14% of the time, but if you ask them whether they read for pleasure in general, they'll say yes 100%, after all they do it every week!
It would be nice if reading researchers could agree on a standard set of survey questions for the purpose of easy comparison.
My problem with this stuff is that somebody who spent three hours on wikipedia reading about the War of the Triple Alliance is usually counted as somebody who didn't read for pleasure that day.
I think from seeing articles like this a few times, that there's a lack of definition from people as what counts as "real reading" and about what materials "count as real reading"
(since I think probably people are reading these days more than ever - it just may be on forums like HN, social media, and AI output, etc.)
so if you just define that specifically then we could just promote it on social media, people reading these specific things, and then "boom" more people are "really reading"
(I presume people want to see more people reading "Great Books of Classic Literature" which is probably a great goal, things like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" or Dante's "The Divine Comedy", etc.)
What's a book, though? I suppose people would at least count a traditional e-book. Does long-form fanfic count? How about a book-length website? What about one that was originally published as a book and then republished online?
Is that understanding also cross-culturally consistent? That's a typical failure mode in comparative surveys between different countries - the meaning of the question depends on the translation used in each language. I imagine here the implied frequency might also vary between languages; maybe English speakers don't say they "read" unless they read once a week, while Spanish speakers are laxer?
All your examples could be printed and read as books - whatever form they are consumed in. What differences are you seeking to highlight with these examples?
People don't usually count reading an online piece of writing as equivalent to reading a book, even if the exact same content could also be in book form. Hence if you ask speakers of a language with a lot of available online reading material (English), you may systematically underestimate how much they read long-form content.
I think it's obvious enough without getting into the weeds like this unless their sample size is unreasonably small. E-book yes obviously counts. For the rest, like fanfic? Probably, but does it matter here? Is this actually going to move the needle?
Be cool if they would research that, instead of asking rhetorical questions and assuming that none of it matters and everything is "obvious."
I think it's just people being snooty. Bestsellers are trash, and by definition a plurality of readers are reading them. I don't think someone who reads Gladwell has any greater cognitive power than somebody who reads twitter.
I think most people would consider it something published alright, as other definitions start to become a bit absurd (e.g. reading the menu at a restaurant or the match day programme probably aren't what people consider as 'reading for pleasure').
Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.
Anglophone countries suffers from social media - with the whole monetization thing driven towards making fake content, rage baiting content that can be consumed in the west & divisive to put people into buckets.
Re-reading it atm, for first time in ~25years, and I’m struck with how much of historical context my kids don’t have that I’d want them to before recommending it to them. I feel I had more of that context when I first read it, but maybe I’m rose tinting my initial reading.
It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries," but I wouldn't say that it gave lessons especially relevant to either Athenian style democracy or to the mixed constitutions called "democracies" from the late eighteenth century to the present.
I have some Spanish ex-co-workers. I just verified it. They both had it on their required reading list in high-school. (one of them is in his 30s, the other in his 40s)
As a born, raised and currently living in Spain, I had never heard that. We have plenty of classical author required in high school: Cervantes, Quevedo, Benavente, Bécquer, Machado, Lorca, Pérez Galdós... Most modern and cool teachers also recommend contemporary authors like Ana María Matute, García Marquez or Jordi Sierra i Fabra. The foreign author most recommended has to be Roah Dahl, Michael Ende, Jules Verne or Exupéry.
I never heard of anybody who has read Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Dante or any other "advanced" foreign author in high school.
One of those links, the first, is from a Galicia school. Incidentaly, I am Galician, and I read "O príncipe, de Maquiavelo" when I was around 40.
The difference in Galicia is that we also have "Literatura Galega", that requires us to read Castelao, Neira Vilas, Rosalía, Murguía, Otero Pedraio... I bet other Comunidades with their own language also recommend local writters.
Unless they went to some kind of private school, where they found a weird literature proffesor with political inclinations (the kind that also recommend Gramsci or Rothbard like it is "literature"), or maybe the requirement was from a philosophy or a history class, I never heard such a thing. Not saying that they are lying, but it is not a common recommendation, even less a requirement.
Why would it not? Divine Comedy and Jack London were both required reading in my Ukrainian school (in translation of course). So was tolstoevsky unfortunately.
Because we have a lot of authors from what we call "golden years", and "Spanish Literature" teachers tend to be extra proud of them. Why would they recommend Dante, when they have "Cantar del Mío Cid"? A Shakespeare translation or original Cervantes? Mark Twain or Benito Pérez Galdós?
I don't mean that non spanish authors are worse (I dislike many of them because they were forced to me too early, when I preferred Dahl or Tolkien), I am just saying that it makes no sense to recommend Shakespeare instead of Cervantes in Spanish Literature class, where they recommend/require books. I can't imagine Russian Literature teachers requiring "Episodios Nacionales" authored by Galdós, a book about spanish history/politics in the XIX century over any russian author about any russian theme.
Yean, sure, sometimes it is like they train us to dislike those authors. But as a spaniard, had you ever heard of someone who was recommended/required to read Maquiavelo? Maybe some weird philosophy teacher? Even more, do you know a lot of people that knows even the name of the book "El Príncipe", and not just "Maquiavelo: el fin justifica los medios", and that's it?
Why unfortunately? Tolstoy and Dostoevky are generally recognized as great authors. Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?
Honestly, this sounds like a shitpost and I'd remove the line if I was the author.
That aside, I really don't understand the glorification of reading. I love reading (also I'm Spanish) and I do it every day, but reading can also just mean reading romance novels and living in a parallel unrealistic world, and that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict.
> that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict
I dunno. There's something to be said for having the focus to sit down and read through a book. It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions. Which in turn suggests an ability to think more clearly and less emotively about politics.
> It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions.
Could just as likely suggest they're affluent enough to have time to sit down and read vs listen to an audio book or just skim news in a magazine or on a screen between jobs.
In other news communist propaganda can't get you don't if don't experience or fear poverty and racist takes aren't appealing if you don't suffer from either the same or ed
>It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts
Maybe. There’s been a significant backlash against popular fiction authors for writing in anything but the first person, single fixed POV recently which sort of suggests that readers don’t like having to deal with the interiority of multiple different characters. If they’re not comfortable with the bare minimum of cognitive dissonance are they really doing much thinking, or just letting the text wash over them as someone does while watching a YouTube video?
I've thought about this. I agree with you not all reading is equal, and reading social posts (including HN) is the equivalent of junk food, but there's something about reading that sets it apart. I think it's like exercising. Reading engages parts of the mind not exercised otherwise, it requires a more active imagination, it often involves "adult" mechanisms like delayed gratification that are less present in other forms of communication. It's more active and less frictionless than many internet activities, watching TV, etc. That's why it's sometimes a struggle to find a moment to read, and why young people often don't do it: it requires more effort than competing activities (this struggle also applies to physical activity, of course!). And this effort does something positive to your brain, I think. I'd say given two forms of trash entertainment, one trashy literature, and the other a trashy TV show, the former is better for you than the latter.
Just in case anyone wants to debate this, I am NOT saying watching TV is completely frictionless or requires no imagination at all, and of course there's a lot of variance in which specific show or movie. I'm only arguing in relative terms.
Every entertainment medium has some level of prestige associated with it mostly based on how old it is, which is the primary reason book reading is venerated. As for the democracy comment, I think the logic there smart people read books and smart people support democracy therefore the more people reading books the more democracy support there is. This is obviously nonsense but it's really popular especially among people who venerate book reading in the abstract like this.
Yeah that is a reach. Also based in Spain and Im not sure they read as much as they say here with teens at home. I could not find any source information for the numbers anywhere (maybe I missed it)
People tend to use the terms "Reading" and "Literate" to be interchangable but they really aren't. I'm sure there are plenty of kids (and adults) who "literally" can't read words and rely heavily on TTS and perhaps STT to interact with the world via their devices.
However the larger and probably more dire issue is of literacy which means you're not only able to read the words but fully understand them and make connections between ideas and be able to communicate what you read to other people. That's the idea that really matters because it unlocks an entire universe of additional learning and a deeper understanding of the world.
The lack of actual literacy is, in my opinion, why America is in such a pickle because there are probably generations of people at this point who fundamentally do not understand what is going on around them (and certainly don't understand any half-way complicated topic or situation) and just float around on "vibes" and their emotions (which they likely also do not understand fully).
> Según los datos proporcionados, en el año 2025 la facturación en el mercado del libro superó los 1250 millones de euros, lo que supone un crecimiento del 4% respecto a los datos del año anterior. El número de libros vendidos alcanzó los 76 millones de libros impresos.
I don't think "less rich population" is an accurate description of Spain. It's a high-income developed country. Perhaps you assumed the article was about Spanish speakers worldwide rather than Spain specifically?
I read books, but I also read essays, newsletters, blogs, Wikipedia articles, discussions and so on. These also contain important and useful information. It's not a dichotomy between books and slop. Hell, a lot of books should have been blog posts.
Audiobooks are also valid, as are podcasts. Sure, they might not engage you like text does, but they still impart knowledge.
To me, this is like ranting against electric bikes because they're not as difficult. If they get more people to engage in a fun activity, then they serve their purpose.
I don't think anyone's saying audiobooks aren't "valid" or worthwhile.
Just that if someone asks you if you were reading this morning, you should probably say "no" if you were listening to a podcast. It's not a value judgement, just a category.
Audiobooks do not feel like disconnecting. It feels like another app on my smart device pumping digital sound into my ears.
Leaving my devices inside and sitting on the porch, reading a book feels much healthier for my brain. And more intentional consumption than passive noise to kill time.
IMO audiobooks and physical books are an identical experience for passive reading, but not for active reading.
So audiobook genre fiction is reading, but audiobook War and Peace or audiobook The C Programming Language doesn't count. Not for arbitrary gate-keeping reasons, but because reading those books implies a more active form of engagement than marching linearly through it.
You're not the first person to say this. I have some empathy for this view, even though its the opposite of mine.
For me, audiobooks offer, more space for imagination. More recently its also a more consistent way to get unbroken narrative into my head. However I strongly suspect that is down to how I process information.
I didn't really read properly until I was quite old, however talking radio was quite ubiquitous in my house. There were lots of audiobook-like content. so perhaps its training?
I must say this truly depends. I can sometimes be more focused with an audiobook. An extreme example? Heidegger's Being and Time, Macquarie and Robinson translation. The audiobook version read by Martyn Swain is a godsend for helping one try to grapple with this monster. Though his only commentary is in timbre, rhythm, speed, it absolutely enriches the reading. The audiobook is something like 24 hours long, but there's just no way you finish in that time (if you ever do finish); if you're like me you've gotta rewind rewind rewind, baby.
A talented reader can work magic. Ukemi and Naxos have great titles.
And it’s my understanding that, auditory vs visual processing aside, studies demonstrate that the brain activation is essentially identical between reading a book and listening to it.
Depends on the amount of focus you dedicate to your listening. But unlike reading, it's much easier to use it as background activity.
Also, I'm very much convinced that the brain is distracted away from the content by the voice acting and intonation; same way that most people physically can't concentrate when listening to music with vocals, evolution made us really sensitive to the human voice.
The article doesn't distinguish reading books from reading anything else. Though it's pretty short and light on details. The article it cites strongly implies the reading is only books.
All that said, [I find] reading books is overrated. They're often outdated, low effort slop, and even more so in this AI era.
I was mostly speaking of nonfiction. Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium. Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn. And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc.
For those who put in the work, there isn't even a cultural bond to enjoy since most of the people who originally consumed those works are themselves dead and buried. (Modern niches and widely studied "classics" notwithstanding.)
> Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium.
What a crazy take!
> Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn.
????
> And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc
I have some news for you. That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do. It is intrinsic to humans, unfortunately.
Pretty easily - I don't think reading a medical text from the 19th century will give you up-to-date information. I'd agree that the concept doesn't apply to fiction, though.
As somebody that spends a lot of time in Spain I can confirm people read a lot compared to the US in general. Seeing a bunch of teenagers in a park reading books is very common and even in rural town where I stay elder people are well read
The only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners.
The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard:
93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's dictionary of Americanism adds another 70k entries. When you include historical and technical terminology, more comprehensive dictionaries will have well over 300k words.
Counting "over a million" from English comes from way, way more inclusive counting methods that throw in technical jargon, acronyms, global slang, etc. The OED, which would compare to the RAE dictionary numbers, lists only 171k words.
Beyond this, counting is complicated by the fact that compounding and morphological changes work differently, English will use different words in cases where Spanish would use suffixes, and will count compounds as words that in Spanish would be phrases.
"there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English, grammar and morphology more nuanced, they do things in different ways but this is a deep misunderstanding.
> "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English
I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other words that convey that precise emotion. There are other ways (thinking of the song "Amor de Loca Juventud" by Buena Vista Social Club - beautiful song), but not many other ways like there are in say French, Swedish, or English, to use a few examples. This is mathematically proven to be true by word count alone - which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages.
It doesn't diminish anything about the Spanish language to point this out either, if anything, it makes it more quaint.
Do you think that Latin-American music is the pinnacle of the Spanish language? Have you read Borges, Cortázar, or Cervantes? I suppose you don’t even know who are they.
OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED.
The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very comprehensive legit Spanish dictionary with technical and historical words. Those two numbers aren't comparable.
"which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages." no you just misunderstood, the numbers are very comparable.
Looking to your perceptions of ngrams in pop lyrics is not a great way of doing linguistics, there are in fact many alternatives in Spanish for expressing emotions about love, whether you are aware of them or not, or whether song writers over use certain words. English lyrics repeat an awful lot of "love" "heart" and "baby".
Or any love poetry by Lorca, Neruda, Benedetti. The idea that Spanish has to resort to "corazon" and "amor" because it... has fewer words than other languages?? People believe some really crazy stuff.
You know very little about Spanish them. The thesaurus grew in a huge way over more than 1000 years of dialects, subdialects, borrowings from:
- Galician (easy mode, a Romance)
- Basque (they lived nearby the Castillans influenced Latin enough for Spanish, so that's a given)
- Catalan (another Romance)
- maybe Iberian, I'm not sure, through Basque
- Celtic, a common word like perro (dog) it's Celtic
- Gothic -yes, Goths, such as sala (living room), casa, (house) guardia...
- Arabic (most words with al- )
- French (carnét/garage...)
- Italian (most of the artsy stuff from the Enlightenment, such as piano)
and whatnot.
If you just pick up with the huge lyrics set from Spain you will find tons of different poetic registers. Just listen to Triana and Medina Azahara and any folk-rock English composer pales against these, because Triana and Medina Azahara it's the American progressive folk-rock from the 60s/70s mixed with Flamenco, and Flamenco itself it's a remix of music genres from several backgrounds. So the amount of feelings spoken and written in lyrics from that really complex tunes (from Triana more than Mediana Azahara) can't be subpar at all.
This is the sort of thing you should run through an LLM. I'm surprised people can read that and not have their bs radar go off.
The only way to get to a million English words is to start counting things that nobody considers separate, or even real words. Even if you were to use a real dictionary word count (a quick search tells me Merriam-Webster unabridged more than cuts your number in half), I'd wonder if they're counting eg "see" and "seen" as one or two words.
(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.
You are counting only the words that have been accepted in the RAE dictionary. A word is only accepted when there is a noticeable usage. So there is a lot of words that have not reached the category of “word” officially, but they exist.
Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.
> Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.
I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.
The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.
But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.
I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.
English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.
If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.
The reading crisis is overblown, women dominate publishing and much of the output is geared toward female readers. Smut and photo-filled recipe books, Wiccan tween fiction. Men are happy reading classics and technical books.
It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since.
That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
And if we look at stuff like the PISA scores, it doesn't seem like this supposed higher rate of reading is paying many dividends.
> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:
1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.
2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.
>Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore
Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.
Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?
This plus a text-to-speech/audiobook feature with autoscrolling would probably do a lot for book consumption (I mean I, for one, would sign up for that waitlist)
I guess I'm nobody then. I almost only read the internet.
You and I both, but come on. Do we really want to compare HN readership numbers to TikTok's viewership?
Walk around in the subway someday and count, out of 100 people, how many are reading on their phone vs scrolling. I have not seen a person read an article or book on their phone in ages.
Yes they exist but even Google is making it harder to find content to read by burying text-based pages below AI summaries and video results.
Most places where people do their weekly groceries in Spain have at least a small book section if not a bookstore by the entrance. It's a typical thing to bring over to the beach or a weekend trip that doesn't matter if it gets damaged or lost.
Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.
> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc.
It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit.
Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's not odd to presume a printed book is going to be of higher quality than a webpage.
You are describing monetization quality, not content quality.
Printing has its moat, yes, which better protects it from copying, and process of consuming from interruptions, and creates payment in advance situation. Printing houses produce enormous amounts of cliche-by-cliche semi-porn "romantic novels", and various sensationalist garbage, and earn money without suffocating dependency on Google, FB and such. Good for them.
> many books are pretty low quality.
Even low-quality books have words people might not know. I often find people who don't read books (physical or eBook) have a much lower vocabulary, and they typically don't value vocabulary, which as an avid reader, I find weird, but I guess to each their own.
Yeah sadly let’s not kid ourselves, most people on their phone on the subway (in the USA) are watching very low quality short form video content. Or they’re reading gossip subreddits or something. If you want to really scare yourself go check out what teachers have to say about the current crop of students and their literacy rates.
We should 100% ban all smart devices for people under 18. Not just in schools but entirely. Middle schoolers literally can’t spell their own names, or words like “want” and “cat”. I would have assumed some of the teachers were pearl-clutching but it’s not just a few of them saying this, it’s all of them, including my own mom who I trust a lot.
>That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.
That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.
No, the vast majority of published books are (and have always been) an insult to trees.
I wonder if this is the reason Spain resisted the advent of far right for so long, compared to its European counterparts.
The Spanish Civil War would like to have a word with you, but maybe Franco is part of "the resistance" now.
Franco died in 1975. They clearly mean recently.
What an odd comment. I'd think it's obvious I referred to the current wave that started 15* years ago.
* give or take some years
Isn't it obvious that nothing is obvious?
Obviously not.
I´ve ended up switching back to paper for half of my reading. Kids prefer paper for reading to. Kindle goes with me on vacation when I don´t want to drag around 2-3 kilos of paper (Reading chunky history books at the moment).
The original article is comparing "a 2023 study showing that only 16% of Americans read for pleasure in a given day, down from the (already low) number of 28% in 2004" with "the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025".
I think a big part of the discrepancy probably comes from the different time frames. If you ask somebody who reads for pleasure once a week whether they did so on a given day, they'll say yes 14% of the time, but if you ask them whether they read for pleasure in general, they'll say yes 100%, after all they do it every week!
It would be nice if reading researchers could agree on a standard set of survey questions for the purpose of easy comparison.
My problem with this stuff is that somebody who spent three hours on wikipedia reading about the War of the Triple Alliance is usually counted as somebody who didn't read for pleasure that day.
Like DAU vs MAU
I think from seeing articles like this a few times, that there's a lack of definition from people as what counts as "real reading" and about what materials "count as real reading"
(since I think probably people are reading these days more than ever - it just may be on forums like HN, social media, and AI output, etc.)
so if you just define that specifically then we could just promote it on social media, people reading these specific things, and then "boom" more people are "really reading"
(I presume people want to see more people reading "Great Books of Classic Literature" which is probably a great goal, things like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" or Dante's "The Divine Comedy", etc.)
I've seen many of these types of articles, and usually they are taking about long form reading, meaning books.
What's a book, though? I suppose people would at least count a traditional e-book. Does long-form fanfic count? How about a book-length website? What about one that was originally published as a book and then republished online?
I'm sure the general population being asked whether they read books have a very clear idea of what a book is.
Is that understanding also cross-culturally consistent? That's a typical failure mode in comparative surveys between different countries - the meaning of the question depends on the translation used in each language. I imagine here the implied frequency might also vary between languages; maybe English speakers don't say they "read" unless they read once a week, while Spanish speakers are laxer?
All your examples could be printed and read as books - whatever form they are consumed in. What differences are you seeking to highlight with these examples?
People don't usually count reading an online piece of writing as equivalent to reading a book, even if the exact same content could also be in book form. Hence if you ask speakers of a language with a lot of available online reading material (English), you may systematically underestimate how much they read long-form content.
I think it's obvious enough without getting into the weeds like this unless their sample size is unreasonably small. E-book yes obviously counts. For the rest, like fanfic? Probably, but does it matter here? Is this actually going to move the needle?
Be cool if they would research that, instead of asking rhetorical questions and assuming that none of it matters and everything is "obvious."
I think it's just people being snooty. Bestsellers are trash, and by definition a plurality of readers are reading them. I don't think someone who reads Gladwell has any greater cognitive power than somebody who reads twitter.
I think most people would consider it something published alright, as other definitions start to become a bit absurd (e.g. reading the menu at a restaurant or the match day programme probably aren't what people consider as 'reading for pleasure').
Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.
The study focuses on books (and comics, but that only bumped it up by a couple of percent).
Inter-country statistics almost entirely rely on definitional disparity. Border towns are good sources of comparison.
Anglophone countries suffers from social media - with the whole monetization thing driven towards making fake content, rage baiting content that can be consumed in the west & divisive to put people into buckets.
> Democracy is safe in Spain!
iirc, The Prince from Machiavelli is required reading during secondary education. That will surely awaken their political awareness.
Re-reading it atm, for first time in ~25years, and I’m struck with how much of historical context my kids don’t have that I’d want them to before recommending it to them. I feel I had more of that context when I first read it, but maybe I’m rose tinting my initial reading.
It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries," but I wouldn't say that it gave lessons especially relevant to either Athenian style democracy or to the mixed constitutions called "democracies" from the late eighteenth century to the present.
> The Prince from Machiavelli is required
In Spain? Never heard of that, and would not make sense. An italian author writting about politics in Florence?
I have some Spanish ex-co-workers. I just verified it. They both had it on their required reading list in high-school. (one of them is in his 30s, the other in his 40s)
As a born, raised and currently living in Spain, I had never heard that. We have plenty of classical author required in high school: Cervantes, Quevedo, Benavente, Bécquer, Machado, Lorca, Pérez Galdós... Most modern and cool teachers also recommend contemporary authors like Ana María Matute, García Marquez or Jordi Sierra i Fabra. The foreign author most recommended has to be Roah Dahl, Michael Ende, Jules Verne or Exupéry.
I never heard of anybody who has read Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Dante or any other "advanced" foreign author in high school.
There are some links with some "obligatory readings" for high school: https://www.edu.xunta.gal/centros/ieslamascastelo/system/fil..., https://www.educa2.madrid.org/web/lengua-castellana-y-litera... http://iesparquegoya.es/files/lengua/Libros%20de%20Lectura%2... or https://iesalgarb.es/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/07/1.-... (first links when I search "lecturas recomendadas ESO") where you will find exactly one non-spanish writting author: Ray Bradbury's 451. A spicy teacher, for sure.
Maybe your coworkers read The Prince, but that is not a general recommendation or even something you heard from time to time.
These guys are from Galicia. Maybe that makes a difference.
One of those links, the first, is from a Galicia school. Incidentaly, I am Galician, and I read "O príncipe, de Maquiavelo" when I was around 40.
The difference in Galicia is that we also have "Literatura Galega", that requires us to read Castelao, Neira Vilas, Rosalía, Murguía, Otero Pedraio... I bet other Comunidades with their own language also recommend local writters.
Unless they went to some kind of private school, where they found a weird literature proffesor with political inclinations (the kind that also recommend Gramsci or Rothbard like it is "literature"), or maybe the requirement was from a philosophy or a history class, I never heard such a thing. Not saying that they are lying, but it is not a common recommendation, even less a requirement.
Why would it not? Divine Comedy and Jack London were both required reading in my Ukrainian school (in translation of course). So was tolstoevsky unfortunately.
Because we have a lot of authors from what we call "golden years", and "Spanish Literature" teachers tend to be extra proud of them. Why would they recommend Dante, when they have "Cantar del Mío Cid"? A Shakespeare translation or original Cervantes? Mark Twain or Benito Pérez Galdós?
I don't mean that non spanish authors are worse (I dislike many of them because they were forced to me too early, when I preferred Dahl or Tolkien), I am just saying that it makes no sense to recommend Shakespeare instead of Cervantes in Spanish Literature class, where they recommend/require books. I can't imagine Russian Literature teachers requiring "Episodios Nacionales" authored by Galdós, a book about spanish history/politics in the XIX century over any russian author about any russian theme.
As a Spaniard I wish we had Mark Twain instead of the drowsy village dramas from the so-called Golden Age.
Yean, sure, sometimes it is like they train us to dislike those authors. But as a spaniard, had you ever heard of someone who was recommended/required to read Maquiavelo? Maybe some weird philosophy teacher? Even more, do you know a lot of people that knows even the name of the book "El Príncipe", and not just "Maquiavelo: el fin justifica los medios", and that's it?
Why unfortunately? Tolstoy and Dostoevky are generally recognized as great authors. Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?
Well, War and Peace is 1200 pages... fuck that at age 15 or whatever XD
Ref.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868
How much of the decline in the US could be attributed to Fountas & Pinnell?
>Democracy is safe in Spain!
Honestly, this sounds like a shitpost and I'd remove the line if I was the author.
That aside, I really don't understand the glorification of reading. I love reading (also I'm Spanish) and I do it every day, but reading can also just mean reading romance novels and living in a parallel unrealistic world, and that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict.
> that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict
I dunno. There's something to be said for having the focus to sit down and read through a book. It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions. Which in turn suggests an ability to think more clearly and less emotively about politics.
> It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions.
Could just as likely suggest they're affluent enough to have time to sit down and read vs listen to an audio book or just skim news in a magazine or on a screen between jobs.
In other news communist propaganda can't get you don't if don't experience or fear poverty and racist takes aren't appealing if you don't suffer from either the same or ed
>It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts
Maybe. There’s been a significant backlash against popular fiction authors for writing in anything but the first person, single fixed POV recently which sort of suggests that readers don’t like having to deal with the interiority of multiple different characters. If they’re not comfortable with the bare minimum of cognitive dissonance are they really doing much thinking, or just letting the text wash over them as someone does while watching a YouTube video?
Re: the glorification of reading.
I've thought about this. I agree with you not all reading is equal, and reading social posts (including HN) is the equivalent of junk food, but there's something about reading that sets it apart. I think it's like exercising. Reading engages parts of the mind not exercised otherwise, it requires a more active imagination, it often involves "adult" mechanisms like delayed gratification that are less present in other forms of communication. It's more active and less frictionless than many internet activities, watching TV, etc. That's why it's sometimes a struggle to find a moment to read, and why young people often don't do it: it requires more effort than competing activities (this struggle also applies to physical activity, of course!). And this effort does something positive to your brain, I think. I'd say given two forms of trash entertainment, one trashy literature, and the other a trashy TV show, the former is better for you than the latter.
Just in case anyone wants to debate this, I am NOT saying watching TV is completely frictionless or requires no imagination at all, and of course there's a lot of variance in which specific show or movie. I'm only arguing in relative terms.
Every entertainment medium has some level of prestige associated with it mostly based on how old it is, which is the primary reason book reading is venerated. As for the democracy comment, I think the logic there smart people read books and smart people support democracy therefore the more people reading books the more democracy support there is. This is obviously nonsense but it's really popular especially among people who venerate book reading in the abstract like this.
Reading a book is also a decent proxy for being able to hold your attention for more than 5 seconds.
Yeah that is a reach. Also based in Spain and Im not sure they read as much as they say here with teens at home. I could not find any source information for the numbers anywhere (maybe I missed it)
The source is https://www.cultura.gob.es/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baromet...
People tend to use the terms "Reading" and "Literate" to be interchangable but they really aren't. I'm sure there are plenty of kids (and adults) who "literally" can't read words and rely heavily on TTS and perhaps STT to interact with the world via their devices.
However the larger and probably more dire issue is of literacy which means you're not only able to read the words but fully understand them and make connections between ideas and be able to communicate what you read to other people. That's the idea that really matters because it unlocks an entire universe of additional learning and a deeper understanding of the world.
The lack of actual literacy is, in my opinion, why America is in such a pickle because there are probably generations of people at this point who fundamentally do not understand what is going on around them (and certainly don't understand any half-way complicated topic or situation) and just float around on "vibes" and their emotions (which they likely also do not understand fully).
Self declared? worthless.
Get me the kindle sale stats.
> Según los datos proporcionados, en el año 2025 la facturación en el mercado del libro superó los 1250 millones de euros, lo que supone un crecimiento del 4% respecto a los datos del año anterior. El número de libros vendidos alcanzó los 76 millones de libros impresos.
From https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...
The assumption being that all reading must be done on kindle?
From the same creators of "no one writes code by hand anymore".
AI effect is delayed in less rich population.
Spain is as rich as Japan on GDP PPP, richer than Israel and New Zealand.
Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.
Saying Spain is rich while half the population lives on 1,000 euros per month (mil euristas) is crazy or just very "technically accurate".
boy howdy let me tell you about how little the USA-ians often live on, or how low the pay is in Japan
It is less than the half, and there is a big unregulated economy in those regions.
I don't think "less rich population" is an accurate description of Spain. It's a high-income developed country. Perhaps you assumed the article was about Spanish speakers worldwide rather than Spain specifically?
Are you one of those Americans that think that Spain is in Latin-America?
If youre only counting books I haven't read anything for maybe a decade. And I maybe read about a hundred hours in life total before that.
If you include a screen I've read everyday for the past 25+ years
IMHO screens and audio don't count as reading books.
I personally think that though the medium is different, audiobooks are at least _similar_ to reading a book.
Screens however, are you including something like an eReader as _not_ reading books?
I think screens, in this context, means stuff like reading blog posts and whatnot on your phone or laptop.
> I personally think that though the medium is different, audiobooks are at least _similar_ to reading a book.
Very different brain processes. They're the same in that they are both forms of entertainment based on a written story, I guess.
I disagree.
I read books, but I also read essays, newsletters, blogs, Wikipedia articles, discussions and so on. These also contain important and useful information. It's not a dichotomy between books and slop. Hell, a lot of books should have been blog posts.
Audiobooks are also valid, as are podcasts. Sure, they might not engage you like text does, but they still impart knowledge.
To me, this is like ranting against electric bikes because they're not as difficult. If they get more people to engage in a fun activity, then they serve their purpose.
I don't think anyone's saying audiobooks aren't "valid" or worthwhile.
Just that if someone asks you if you were reading this morning, you should probably say "no" if you were listening to a podcast. It's not a value judgement, just a category.
Could you expand on the audiobook part?
Im assuming that screens dont count because its not novels/literature
but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting
Audiobooks do not feel like disconnecting. It feels like another app on my smart device pumping digital sound into my ears.
Leaving my devices inside and sitting on the porch, reading a book feels much healthier for my brain. And more intentional consumption than passive noise to kill time.
> feels much healthier
Isn't that how tarot cards and all that bollocks works?
IMO audiobooks and physical books are an identical experience for passive reading, but not for active reading.
So audiobook genre fiction is reading, but audiobook War and Peace or audiobook The C Programming Language doesn't count. Not for arbitrary gate-keeping reasons, but because reading those books implies a more active form of engagement than marching linearly through it.
I just think listening to a book is not the same as actually reading it. Just my personal preference, really, and I'm not knocking down on audiobooks.
Listening to audiobooks, IMHO, is a more passive and less focused way of consuming literature.
Thank you for this.
You're not the first person to say this. I have some empathy for this view, even though its the opposite of mine.
For me, audiobooks offer, more space for imagination. More recently its also a more consistent way to get unbroken narrative into my head. However I strongly suspect that is down to how I process information.
I didn't really read properly until I was quite old, however talking radio was quite ubiquitous in my house. There were lots of audiobook-like content. so perhaps its training?
I must say this truly depends. I can sometimes be more focused with an audiobook. An extreme example? Heidegger's Being and Time, Macquarie and Robinson translation. The audiobook version read by Martyn Swain is a godsend for helping one try to grapple with this monster. Though his only commentary is in timbre, rhythm, speed, it absolutely enriches the reading. The audiobook is something like 24 hours long, but there's just no way you finish in that time (if you ever do finish); if you're like me you've gotta rewind rewind rewind, baby.
A talented reader can work magic. Ukemi and Naxos have great titles.
And it’s my understanding that, auditory vs visual processing aside, studies demonstrate that the brain activation is essentially identical between reading a book and listening to it.
Imo, audio books are perfectly comparable to listening to podcasts. Calling it reading is absurd. It is not reading, it is listening.
And reading on screen is reading.
> but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting
Audio books are passive content. It's not reading. Not remotely the same brain process.
Depends on the amount of focus you dedicate to your listening. But unlike reading, it's much easier to use it as background activity.
Also, I'm very much convinced that the brain is distracted away from the content by the voice acting and intonation; same way that most people physically can't concentrate when listening to music with vocals, evolution made us really sensitive to the human voice.
Screens don't count?
The article doesn't distinguish reading books from reading anything else. Though it's pretty short and light on details. The article it cites strongly implies the reading is only books.
All that said, [I find] reading books is overrated. They're often outdated, low effort slop, and even more so in this AI era.
How could fiction books become outdated? That is an absolutely alien opinion for me!
-edit- I said "non-fiction" when I meant "fiction". Of course non-fiction books become obsolete quite fast sometimes.
I was mostly speaking of nonfiction. Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium. Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn. And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc.
For those who put in the work, there isn't even a cultural bond to enjoy since most of the people who originally consumed those works are themselves dead and buried. (Modern niches and widely studied "classics" notwithstanding.)
> Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium.
What a crazy take!
> Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn.
????
> And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc
I have some news for you. That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do. It is intrinsic to humans, unfortunately.
> Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium
Shakespeare is so old it's now undecipherable to any English speaker without a cliffnotes explaining it all.... for instance
Nah, if you spend a few minutes understanding one, the rest are easy.
> That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do.
No doubt. Doesn't mean I want to consume more of it via fiction.
Pretty easily - I don't think reading a medical text from the 19th century will give you up-to-date information. I'd agree that the concept doesn't apply to fiction, though.
"Reading books is overrated" -- what an HN take. You've gotta be kidding me.
Perhaps you can make some counter points and change my mind?
The statistic is total garbage
nobody reads books in spain
and democracy doesn't have anything to do with that
and democracy is not desirable per se
but of course it wouldn't need to be stated if the writer wasn't a dogmatic idy0t
As somebody that spends a lot of time in Spain I can confirm people read a lot compared to the US in general. Seeing a bunch of teenagers in a park reading books is very common and even in rural town where I stay elder people are well read
What data do you have to support your statement? Because Im the read world A lot of books are published and sold in Spain.
https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...
https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...
Spanish is one of the smallest languages in the world at ~93k words.
Most languages have hundreds of thousands, English has over a million.
Spanish is also nearly phonetic. It's very simple, there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages.
Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.
The only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners.
The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard:
93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's dictionary of Americanism adds another 70k entries. When you include historical and technical terminology, more comprehensive dictionaries will have well over 300k words.
Counting "over a million" from English comes from way, way more inclusive counting methods that throw in technical jargon, acronyms, global slang, etc. The OED, which would compare to the RAE dictionary numbers, lists only 171k words.
Beyond this, counting is complicated by the fact that compounding and morphological changes work differently, English will use different words in cases where Spanish would use suffixes, and will count compounds as words that in Spanish would be phrases.
"there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English, grammar and morphology more nuanced, they do things in different ways but this is a deep misunderstanding.
Using your figures:
93k (Spanish) to 171k English
or
300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English
the original point still stands.
> "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English
I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other words that convey that precise emotion. There are other ways (thinking of the song "Amor de Loca Juventud" by Buena Vista Social Club - beautiful song), but not many other ways like there are in say French, Swedish, or English, to use a few examples. This is mathematically proven to be true by word count alone - which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages.
It doesn't diminish anything about the Spanish language to point this out either, if anything, it makes it more quaint.
Do you think that Latin-American music is the pinnacle of the Spanish language? Have you read Borges, Cortázar, or Cervantes? I suppose you don’t even know who are they.
You are mixing numbers that don't go together.
OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED.
The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very comprehensive legit Spanish dictionary with technical and historical words. Those two numbers aren't comparable.
"which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages." no you just misunderstood, the numbers are very comparable.
Looking to your perceptions of ngrams in pop lyrics is not a great way of doing linguistics, there are in fact many alternatives in Spanish for expressing emotions about love, whether you are aware of them or not, or whether song writers over use certain words. English lyrics repeat an awful lot of "love" "heart" and "baby".
Any record from Triana or Medina Azahara would make any argument void because the deepness it's almost unmatched.
Or any love poetry by Lorca, Neruda, Benedetti. The idea that Spanish has to resort to "corazon" and "amor" because it... has fewer words than other languages?? People believe some really crazy stuff.
You know very little about Spanish them. The thesaurus grew in a huge way over more than 1000 years of dialects, subdialects, borrowings from:
- Galician (easy mode, a Romance)
- Basque (they lived nearby the Castillans influenced Latin enough for Spanish, so that's a given)
- Catalan (another Romance)
- maybe Iberian, I'm not sure, through Basque
- Celtic, a common word like perro (dog) it's Celtic
- Gothic -yes, Goths, such as sala (living room), casa, (house) guardia...
- Arabic (most words with al- )
- French (carnét/garage...)
- Italian (most of the artsy stuff from the Enlightenment, such as piano)
and whatnot.
If you just pick up with the huge lyrics set from Spain you will find tons of different poetic registers. Just listen to Triana and Medina Azahara and any folk-rock English composer pales against these, because Triana and Medina Azahara it's the American progressive folk-rock from the 60s/70s mixed with Flamenco, and Flamenco itself it's a remix of music genres from several backgrounds. So the amount of feelings spoken and written in lyrics from that really complex tunes (from Triana more than Mediana Azahara) can't be subpar at all.
This is the sort of thing you should run through an LLM. I'm surprised people can read that and not have their bs radar go off.
The only way to get to a million English words is to start counting things that nobody considers separate, or even real words. Even if you were to use a real dictionary word count (a quick search tells me Merriam-Webster unabridged more than cuts your number in half), I'd wonder if they're counting eg "see" and "seen" as one or two words.
(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.
Anyway, just a wild thing to read.
You are counting only the words that have been accepted in the RAE dictionary. A word is only accepted when there is a noticeable usage. So there is a lot of words that have not reached the category of “word” officially, but they exist.
Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.
Yes, but I have an outrageous American English accent which ruins my attempt to speak it!
> Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.
I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.
The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.
But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.
I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.
English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.
If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.
The reading crisis is overblown, women dominate publishing and much of the output is geared toward female readers. Smut and photo-filled recipe books, Wiccan tween fiction. Men are happy reading classics and technical books.
Take this incel garbage back to 4chan.
Ruin 4chan and the whole internet becomes 4chan, you know this to be true.