The Plan

Look at an ad in 4 languages and report what it's like to try to read and understand it.

Language experience:

• English native
• Spanish -4 years in school, 1 year in spanish-speaking country age 15-16
• Japanese: 3 years in college, 3 years in-country from age 23-26
• Mandarin: no initial study, 11 years in country, perhaps an equivalent of 2 years of study all told during and after the time spent in country.

Despite ever-increasing time devoted to study, my earliest languages are still the best. I'd say that my Japanese is still much better than my Mandarin, too.

Note: this is only for comprehension. For production, Spanish is extremely backlogged due to not having much chance to use it.

Actual link & image for this plot of land

https://www.cnpropiedades.cl/bahiayuste051ha

Here is the google map: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Capilla+de+Yuste/@-41.8140528,-73.8848538,2184m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x9622ed005fbb88e5:0xc07f7395b1fb9667!8m2!3d-41.8155347!4d-73.8874313!16s%2Fg%2F11yd7lgwy7!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDcyNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

They wanted 59k USD for 1.34acres of land, 2 hours drive from Puerto Montt in southern Chile, which is 1000km or 12 hours south of Santiago, by car

I suppose it's reasonable but I find the following results:

Results of looking at the image for 1 second

English:

The baseline

Spanish:

Perhaps 30% of baseline

Japanese:

I have a chance but I have no sightreading of Katakana ability despite knowing it just fine. I get a feeling/sense from quite a few of the single character words; the spacing and word divisions from the hiragana help point me to the right place. The katakana sections jump out at me too; being instant at reading them would help a ton. Overall I do get some kind of sense of what it says from just the first glandce.

Mandarin

My familiarity and word-breaking ability is too low to get almost anything form it. If I look at the red highlight text, I actually can get a sense of this instantly. But the rest of it is painful.

Numbers

One interesting thing is how in Mandarin, the numbers stand out very much to me. The fact that they have counters after them actually help a lot, too, even though as a speaker/writer that part of the language can be tiresome.

English

The original Spanish

Japanese

Mandarin

The Location

It's a little bay, in rural Chile, facing north through a channel between Chile's largest island and the mainland. It's about 2 hours away from the largest city in southern Chile: Puerto Montt at about 250k.