So where is the line for nsfw, visiting a porn site, seeing the actual porn video, or do I need to download the file to my work computer and then watch it?
Yesterday I set up a Pi-Hole container which my internal DNS server now uses as an upstream resolver. As a first time Pi-Hole user I can now confirm that it does its job just fine.
For some odd reason uBlock didn't block it for me, after I disabled Pi-Hole to check.
It's not a first party ad. Maybe there is a reason why I added amazon-adsytem.com to the uBlock whitelist.
It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe.
These kind of writing systems really don't seem suited to being input via a conventional keyboard, even with software assistance.
I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
There has been the stylus tech for a while to do good input, but typing out phonetically is basically much quicker (and the "flick"-based inputs of touchscreens even faster). Do you want to write out like 7 lines on a screen for a character? or just type its 2-4 letter phonetic?
The current input stuff is basically like T9 crossed with gmail's autocomplete: it's really good at predicting what you want for the most part, and lets you type at very fast speeds whne you're good at stuff. Exaggerating a bit with the GMail autocomplete but some very common fragments will pop up almost instantly when you start typing them in.
In a sense the input methods are a solved problem.
>Do you want to write out like 7 lines on a screen for a character? or just type its 2-4 letter phonetic?...
>The current input stuff is basically like T9 crossed with gmail's autocomplete...
DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about writing Japanese characters. But it was the fact that current methods require typing a phonetic equivalent using an alien character set [ie. Latin] which is then translated back to the desired Japanese character set that seemed so clunky to me.
But I'm imagining it from the point of view if I had to learn the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets and type phonetically in them to have the computer then try and guess what I wanted to write in the Latin alphabet. But maybe for Japanese people brought up on this method of entering text, the Latin alphabet is completely familiar, so this disconnect doesn't happen?
> that current methods require typing a phonetic equivalent using an alien character set [ie. Latin] which is then translated back to the desired Japanese character set
Keyboard with kana is inconvenient because it is just latin 26-keys keyboard and Japanese has about 40 kana characters. If they have added an additional row then it would allow typing twice faster than on a latin keyboard (because one kana character is equivalent to 2-3 latin characters).
But keyboard manufacturers do not want to make better keyboards for non-latin countries, they just overlay foreign characters on standard 26-key keyboard because it is cheaper.
Japanese keyboards aren't mere standard Latin keyboards. They have several additional keys which make them physically a distinct layout to what the rest of the world uses.
They only have a couple extra keys when they need maybe an extra row. (IMO unnecessary) Trade offs have been made, like in most non US latin languages, for compatibility with the US keyboard layout. It is similar to the European keyboard layout where it is painfully obvious that they would have a much more efficient layout if they just added more keys, but they chose not too because then it would differ too much from the US standard.
Typing phonetically works incredibly well. My wife (she's Japanese) writes her documents and text very fast. She says that she's actually a bit unusual (at least for her age group) in using that method, which surprised me because it's so efficient. But ".. using an alien character set" isn't actually an issue - in Japan you learn Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Latin letters. My wife's handwriting (with Latin letters) is way better than my own.
The thing is you don't even need to have a bigger keyboard: there is currently an input method that maps every key to a given kana. Not sure why it isn't more widespread though
There aren't enough keys for that, especially with the many digraphs that exist. It's simply far more convenient to say type <kya> and receive <きゃ> than some method to enter the small <や>.
The standard method of entering <ん> with either <n> or <nn> depending on context is silly, however, and I simply have it on the otherwise unused <l>.
Context is required to disambiguate ん vs an initial consonant of the な行. There's not really another choice unless you want to make <n> exclusively used for one or the other, which also isn't great.
<l> is also not unused, it's a prefix for the smaller version of characters e.g. <le> => ぇ or <ltu> => っ
Because the Japanese character does not depend on context, it is always <ん> and that one has to enter it differently depending on what follows it is annoying, especially when this can even be another word due to the lack of spaces. It is really counter intuitive to in that scheme to, say, type “一時間歩いた”.
> Context is required to disambiguate ん vs an initial consonant of the な行. There's not really another choice unless you want to make <n> exclusively used for one or the other, which also isn't great.
My other choice is simple; use <l> to input <ん> at all times since <l> isn't used in Japanese.
> <l> is also not unused, it's a prefix for the smaller version of characters e.g. <le> => ぇ or <ltu> => っ
That can also be done with <x>, which is the more popular version.
I don't know that you can call latin characters (romaji) "alien" to modern Japanese. Aside from everyone learning English throughout their entire school career, romaji is pretty common in signage and interfaces. If you write Japanese in romaji, anyone on the street can read it. This is not something you can say about rendering English in katakana.
I reviewed the thread and I think you are confusing
Normille (the one I responded to) with Tor3 (who actually seems to back up my assertion). Unless I missed something of course. I'll obviously yield to a native speaker's opinion on this.
It isn't entered phonetically; it's entered structurally.
There are actually three characters that are pronounced the same as three other characters, but those are entered in different ways for structural reasons, and Japanese characters are neatly arranged on a grid in a way that is sensible that does not necessarily correspond to pronunciation well but corresponds well to structure. The character entered with <ti> for instance in pronunciation corresponds more closely to the digraph entered with <tya>, but in structure corresponds more closely to the character entered with <ta>, and is therefore found on the same row.
When all digraphs and characters are summed's close to 90 characters I believe, which does not fit neatly on a keyboard, and then even enter the modern digraphs that are used in loan transcription which do not correspond to any native structure of Japanese which probably add another 20-30 characters which are also made with structural combinations that make sense. <thi> is a common combination to enter something that has nothing to do with the pronunciation <th> would suggest, but it structurally makes sense.
And then on top of that there are various nonsense accents and other modifications that officially have no place in the standard language but find their way in creative language.
If English had 80 characters in it's script, but the characters so neatly corresponded in a structural way that they could be arranged nicely on a grid, typing methods would probably also rely on combining simpler forms to produce them rather than have a keyboard that spans the full range as it's simply more efficient.
I don't think it's fair to say it isn't entered phonetically. Fundamentally typing in Japanese is grounded in providing the phonetics of a word which can then be converted to more precise characters.
As for Romaji based input, certainly there are some liberties taken based on the logical structure of kana that have been to applied to typing for convenience, but for the most part the Romaji has been chosen for phonetic reasons.
It's also worth noting that from an English perspective the sound you associate with <ti> might be different from the sound a Japanese person might associate with it. Just because the usage isn't strictly the English phonetics, doesn't mean the symbols aren't being used phonetically.
> I don't think it's fair to say it isn't entered phonetically. Fundamentally typing in Japanese is grounded in providing the phonetics of a word which can then be converted to more precise characters.
Yet <づ> and <ず> are phonetically indistinct but entered differently; the input scheme is really not based upon phonetics but on structure.
> It's also worth noting that from an English perspective the sound you associate with <ti> might be different from the sound a Japanese person might associate with it. Just because the usage isn't strictly the English phonetics, doesn't mean the symbols aren't being used phonetically.
I think you might confuse the words “phonetic” and “phonemic” here. One can argue that <づ> and ＜ず> are phonemically distinct in modern Japanese but certainly not phonetically, but <お> and <を> are certainly phonemically indistinct and <おう>, <オー> and <おお> are all phonemically and phonetically indistinct as well but entered differently.
More modern linguistic analyses also analyse the sound of <ち> as /ci/ in modern Japanese, due to the almost universal distinction made with <ティ> in modern Japanese, arguing that the historical /t/ has now split in /t/ and /c/, yet /ci/ is entered as <ti> and /ti/ as <thi>, simply because /ti/ is very rare and occurs only in recent borrowings so it makes more sense.
Of course <王> and <追う> sound quite different, but are both entered with <ou> and selecting the appropriate characters from the dropdown.
> Yet <づ> and <ず> are phonetically indistinct but entered differently; the input scheme is really not based upon phonetics but on structure.
Not sure what what your point is here. ず＆づ may or may not be phonetically indistinct based on region.
> I think you might confuse the words “phonetic” and “phonemic” here.
I mean phonetic more in the layman sense e.g. relates to the sounds, not the most technical linguistic definition. To be blunt, the linguistic definition is silly anyways since literally no natural language will ever strictly meet it.
> It really is neither phonetic nor phonemic.
I guess my original point was that just because you can type certain kana in different ways that may not be strictly phonetic they make sense as simplifications based on the structures you mention, and they make typing easier.
This does not mean you cannot type using inputs that correspond to more strictly phonetic romanizations e.g. hepburn.
> Not sure what what your point is here. ず＆づ may or may not be phonetically indistinct based on region.
In Standard Japanese orthography, all occurrences of <づ> have been replaced with <ず> except where structural reasons remain; the etymology is irrelevant for the orthography and so is the pronunciation in different dialects. In dialects that maintain the distinction between them, many instances of <ず> are pronounced as <づ>, and dialects in general do not follow the standard structure and grammar.
It is absolutely not the case that some actual spoken dialect of Japanese exists somewhere that follows the distinction between them as written in standard Japanese.
> I guess my original point was that just because you can type certain kana in different ways that may not be strictly phonetic they make sense as simplifications based on the structures you mention, and they make typing easier.
They do, but the input method is not based on phonology but on structure and Japanese orthography which does not strictly follow the phonoogy of Japanese.
My point is that it is not entered how it is pronounced in Japanese, but that word in Japanese has an official hiragana speling, which may or may not correspond with how it actually is pronounced, and a system that neatly maps to that spelling is used to enter the characters, not the pronunciation of it.
The official hiragana spelling of such words came before the invention of i.m.e.'s.
> This does not mean you cannot type using inputs that correspond to more strictly phonetic romanizations e.g. hepburn.
I do not subscribe to the theory that Hepburn is more phonetic or phonemic than Kunrei myself; <hu> seems to be a closer approximation for modern Japanse than <fu> in particular than <tyu>, as in “tube” also corresponds better than <chu> as in “chew” to me.
Having said that, that's harder because Hepburn is lossy with regards to the original hiragana orthography and neutralizes <づ> and <ず> among some others.
> It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe.
It's extremely annoying to be honest.
I fully believe that logographic scripts are faster to read once properly mastered, but writing or inputting them is another matter altogether and the article doesn't even begin to touch upon some of the frustrations such as the i.m.e.'s intelligence deciding at the last character to change the educated guess, completely changing the sentence from what intended as one presses “enter” or the inability to type without looking at what one types which is quite possible in many other scripts.
The system tries to be as intelligent as it can and learns from patterns so the guesses are usually correct, but it also means that at times it is unprædictable.
It can also be quite disorienting for a sentence to suddenly shrink or expand considerably as one is typing, and it isn't generally easy to see part of a word one has typed; only when the full word be typed is the proper conversion made and before that point the i.m.e. actually converts it to something entirely differently, often completely misinterpreting the structure of the sentence because a sentence that ends on an incomplete verb is not a sentence grammatically speaking so the i.m.e. doesn't know what to do with it.
Then comes the fact that the i.m.e. is generally very bad with colloquial Japanese as it's conversion rules rely on the grammar of standard textbook Japanese.
Having said that, there is an odd sense of satisfaction to typing Japanese when the i.m.e. agree with the intent of the user. There is something satisfying about a garbled sentence that looks like nothing instantly transforming into a coherent sentence as the last character is added to it.
> I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
Yes, the system is quite a bit different there; as the article says: Japanese characters are primarily arranged in a grid of with a width of 5, so te standard approach there is to drag in one of four directions, or not drag at all to select a character, and a list of possible conversions to Chinese characters is more easily available with a touch screen to select from. In this sense typing Japanese on a mobile phone is actually not any more time consuming than typing English on a mobile phone, but on a keyboard, there are definite problems with it.
Yes, that too, the u.i. must support it and often it doesn't. As well as numerous issues with printing and ignoring or wrongly rendering my fontconfig directive to render characters in that codepoint space at 130% size.
Many video games use a custom input form as well as also simply ignore it.
One thing I noticed watching some Japanese youtubers playing games like Minecraft is that some of them had figured out how to use the IME to input Japanese kanji/kana into the chatbox, but others just communicated in roman characters directly. So you'd have conversations in text-entry romaji, that they would have to sound out verbally when they received to understand what it meant. e.g.
A: [in minecraft chat] "rapisurazuri kudasai!"
B: [talking to themselves] what is that? ra-pi-su-ra-zu-ri-ku-da-sai... aah, I understand.
Technically it's incredibly complicated, unreliable and crazy it even works at all. The upside is that mobile phones have the same problem space, and Japanese was ready from get go to deal with autocomplete on crammed touchscreens.
From a user point of view, you get used to it and it's not so bad after a while. The irritating parts (e.g. having to get back to the middle of your sentence to fix a typo otherwise the surrounding characters are also messed up) are offset by the ease to input emoji, pictograms, or basically any unicode char. you remember the name is a godsend ♡
I don't think Japanese IME is difficult. You just type the word as it is pronounced.
Typing on a smartphone is more difficult because the keyboard has only 10 keys for characters and you have to tap a key and slide up/down/left/right to chose one of 4 characters.
For typing in keyboard, typing Japanese is decent speed in most cases even though IME isn't perfect. It's a bit pain combined with Vim since both IME and Vim has mode.
For input in smartphone, flick input is great way to input but we miss Swype style (or say predicting style) input in Japanese Qwerty keyboard.
Writing Japanese on screen isn't great since Japanese forgetting writing kanjis.
It's very straightforward, and although typing speed is not quite the same as English (for me, at least, although I am not a native speaker), it's not wildly different.
Typing a Japanese word or phrase is just like typing in English, with the exception of selecting the appropriate kanji from a list (no mouse or stylus required). An experienced typist can do this very quickly, on a physical keyboard or on a smartphone.
For a word like "Japanese" (language), i.e., Nihongo or 日本語, it's actually fewer keystrokes than in English: 5 vs. 8, or 9 if you count the space afterward since Japanese doesn't have the same spacing requirements.
I was deeply impressed when I visited Japan in early 2000's and saw people with flip-phones typing in Japanese at speed comparable to what I saw people do on a flip-phone using English. It looked like they had auto-complete available on phones a decade before we saw it in the US!
During the pre-smartphone days, at least, I found Japanese input to be much more efficient than English/French due to the need to input far fewer characters to say the same thing. The difference was signficant enough that if I was writing to another foreigner who spoke Japanese, we'd generally just write in Japanese.
I remember being disappointed at the original iPhone since it didn't include a fingerprint scanner, digital wallet/train pass, or video recording support, all of which were available on my Japanese flip-phone that had been released 3 years earlier at less than half the price.
I've been studying Japanese for about 10 years now and think these systems are actually rather intuitive if you know the language. Digital input methods aside, most of the complexity comes from the writing system itself and just comes with the territory.
Phonetic IMEs aren't the only input methods available. There are a number of input methods based off of character components for Chinese and Japanese that are generally an order of magnitude faster (not accounting for predictive text). It requires about the same level of memorization as learning Vim. The problem with phonetic input is that it doesn't narrow down the search space enough for typing to be open loop. It's essentially the equivalent of typing in IPA and then selecting the equivalent English spelling. The problem is that without predictive text the search is too broad for any given input. Kanji actually has a set of about ~500 atomic components that all characters can decompose down to, so if you just map these in a lossy way to the US keyboard or just the numpad for some input methods, the search space is narrow enough that you can get close to open loop typing.
You can also decompose to about 10 strokes, whose order when written is set, so you can map from sequences of those strokes.
The problem with all these input methods IMO is that they're not deterministic and therefore not open loop because that just wasn't one of the design goals.
The additional benefit is that you can apply whatever rules your input method uses to symbols from math or other languages, which IMO is far simpler than using LaTeX syntax if you just want to type a ‰ or ⊥ sign. My input method can type Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Russian as well as some mischellaneous symbols.
Entirely mechanical component based typewriters were being developed in the 50s but never came to fruition. By the time electronic typewriters came along it was decided that it was just cheaper to use the existing physical keyboards designed for Ascii or numpads on phones and work around it with software. This seems to have been a consistent pattern for most languages regardless of the number of symbols or whether they were phonetic. IMO I believe if they had just standardized on a more specialized keyboard layout in the 80s IMEs would not exist. IMO you can likely deterministically type Kanji in a open loop way if there were maybe 2 to 5 times the number of physical keys as the standard, or the same number of physical keys with 4 more shift keys. The advent of predictive text the need for it is basically nil for the majority of people in the same way the majority of people have no need for LaTeX or Vim.
Kanji, like many Asian scripts, has no word spacing. So what is and is not a word is a bit of a hard problem. Implementing word count for kanji is a non trivial problem. There's a Norwegian that did a machine learned stemmer for Kanji for Elasticsearch at some point to group characters in meaningful groups.
Probably characters per minute is a better comparison but it's still apples and oranges as you typically need less characters in kanji to spell out the same thing.
Where to put spaces in Japanese if Japanese should be written with spaces is a trivial and solved problem. Texts intended for children in full hiragana or old video game texts in full hiragana typically include spaces for ease of reading and they agree on where to put them.
I don't understand the common argument that Japanese has no concept of “words”; it is true that Japanese orthography lacks them, but Japanese speakers intuitively agree on where spaces should be put.
I think the real cause of this might simply be that in romanization, it is common to see spaces put where they shouldn't, and that on one end a common way to romanize contrasts with what feels intuitive makes people think that it's a difficult issue with no easy answer, but there is a very easy and solved answer, one that's simply different from the most common form of romanizing outside of linguistic textbooks.
Having said hat, they are no indication for typing speed, but neither are words in English since there can be long and short words too but probably more extreme in Japanese as a sentence that merely consists of a single very long verb would be considered “one word” under this scheme, as that's how it is pronounced prosodically.
Yup, I understand that. But a fair comparison would be "here is a novel, in both Japanese and English. Now who will type it faster? The Japanese writer using a Japanese typewriter or the English writer using English typewriter?"
Maybe measuring semantic density would make more sense than literal characters/words. Produce two matching texts in Japanese and English that multiple experts in both languages can agree are comparable in both meaning and relative verbosity, then divide the total number of English words by the Japanese typer's time, and you'll have a rough WPM score that can be used for more apples-to-apples comparisons.
It appears the Koreans were the smart bunch among east Asians. They ditched the tiresome Chinese writing system and moved on to something much more elegant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul.
There is certain advantages certainly of being able to design and impose a new writing system as opposed to one that developed organically. Hangul is an elegantly designed writing system for sure.
But to suggest that makes them the "smart bunch" of east Asians comes off as pretty derisive. Hangul has had its own unique issues with regards to typewriter design which has also been alleviated thanks to IME.
The Japanese also have a phonetic writing system, kana, which is at least as old as Hangul. But so much useful context is lost when writing in pure kana rather than the standard writing system (a mix of kana, Chinese characters and, occasionally, Latin text) that it's not really used exclusively unless context requires it (children's books, old video games, etc).
Ignoring the fact that Koreans still have to use Chinese characters in technical snd academic contexts and the fact that the unstoppable change of language means that certain spellings are already becoming non-phonetic, from a technical point of view it's the same issue. If you look at Unicode Korean still has to use thousands of characters for precomposed Hangul blocks. Koreans also have to use input methods to convert from keystrokes representing individual Hangul letters to one of the thousands of precomposed Hangul codepoints. In fact the fact that Korean input methods like to change the precomposed characters in the text field as you type makes it more likely to break than Chinese and Japanese input methods.
It appears the Koreans did not go far enough / did not try hard enough. The better course of action would have been to replace the incompatible bits of their language with things more manageable with IME-less hangul.
I'd suggest you really reflect on what you're saying here. Plenty of languages present unique challenges when it comes to a typing system that was designed essentially to only work with block letters, not just east Asian ones. Suggesting that they simply "fix" their language to make it easier to type is straight up offensive and ignorant.
Arabic script, for example, is always cursive script, which requires a computer to link the characters when typed, which is a similar problem that hangul has, where the character blocks are broken down syllabically. You could create a phonetic alphabet keyboard covering every single possibility, but the issue here is that you have over 11,000 possibilities, which in the end puts you in the same predicament that Hanzi and Kanji are in, where you end up with these amusingly difficult to use typewriters.
Practical how? It's literally an order of magnitude easier to implement Korean or Chinese TTS than English. A Korean block or Chinese character only has one pronounciation, with the number exceptions few enough to list. The mapping from symbol to sound is near deterministic. English TTS has been under development for decades and it usually still doesn't pronounce half the words right. They also don't require the convoluted kerning and line breaking algorithm that English text needs. Unlike for latin, Monospace spacing is canonical, so you don't have to do the weird dance where code has to use one font and prose another font. Literally the only argument you can make is that if you mutilate English spelling enough you can get do a 8 bit per character encoding, but that's a dumb point because a 16bit Korean or Chinese character usually represents more information than 5 English letters.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter
Well that's one way to monetize your in-depth blog posts about the history of Japanese typewriters.
https://i.postimg.cc/X7t0JwN7/jap-type.jpg
Maybe because I have NoScript as well, it got cut off? Not that I care anyway.
For some odd reason uBlock didn't block it for me, after I disabled Pi-Hole to check.
It's not a first party ad. Maybe there is a reason why I added amazon-adsytem.com to the uBlock whitelist.
https://blog.gatunka.com/2009/09/12/using-a-japanese-ime/
It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe.
These kind of writing systems really don't seem suited to being input via a conventional keyboard, even with software assistance.
I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
Definitely. It's still annoying when you type half width in a field that requires full width or something like that.
But the keyboard changing feels natural - only badly designed UIs feel clunky.
The current input stuff is basically like T9 crossed with gmail's autocomplete: it's really good at predicting what you want for the most part, and lets you type at very fast speeds whne you're good at stuff. Exaggerating a bit with the GMail autocomplete but some very common fragments will pop up almost instantly when you start typing them in.
In a sense the input methods are a solved problem.
But I'm imagining it from the point of view if I had to learn the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets and type phonetically in them to have the computer then try and guess what I wanted to write in the Latin alphabet. But maybe for Japanese people brought up on this method of entering text, the Latin alphabet is completely familiar, so this disconnect doesn't happen?
FWIW, the common "flick" method on phones is done using the native hiragana characters which by a coincidence handily map onto a T9-style layout https://lpgen.line-scdn.net/mobile-guide/7037/images/169626/...
Keyboard sold in Japan have the corresponding kana on their keys so you can input using native characters, but it's generally "only used by old people" https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WdEEFbM3kmER2rJReyr0...
So using latin characters isn't required per se, but on PCs it tends to be a choice.
But keyboard manufacturers do not want to make better keyboards for non-latin countries, they just overlay foreign characters on standard 26-key keyboard because it is cheaper.
I would even argue that having to have a larger keyboard and moving the hands more would greatly offset that.
The standard method of entering <ん> with either <n> or <nn> depending on context is silly, however, and I simply have it on the otherwise unused <l>.
Context is required to disambiguate ん vs an initial consonant of the な行. There's not really another choice unless you want to make <n> exclusively used for one or the other, which also isn't great.
<l> is also not unused, it's a prefix for the smaller version of characters e.g. <le> => ぇ or <ltu> => っ
Because the Japanese character does not depend on context, it is always <ん> and that one has to enter it differently depending on what follows it is annoying, especially when this can even be another word due to the lack of spaces. It is really counter intuitive to in that scheme to, say, type “一時間歩いた”.
> Context is required to disambiguate ん vs an initial consonant of the な行. There's not really another choice unless you want to make <n> exclusively used for one or the other, which also isn't great.
My other choice is simple; use <l> to input <ん> at all times since <l> isn't used in Japanese.
> <l> is also not unused, it's a prefix for the smaller version of characters e.g. <le> => ぇ or <ltu> => っ
That can also be done with <x>, which is the more popular version.
Also note that not all uses of the word "alien" are negative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
There are actually three characters that are pronounced the same as three other characters, but those are entered in different ways for structural reasons, and Japanese characters are neatly arranged on a grid in a way that is sensible that does not necessarily correspond to pronunciation well but corresponds well to structure. The character entered with <ti> for instance in pronunciation corresponds more closely to the digraph entered with <tya>, but in structure corresponds more closely to the character entered with <ta>, and is therefore found on the same row.
When all digraphs and characters are summed's close to 90 characters I believe, which does not fit neatly on a keyboard, and then even enter the modern digraphs that are used in loan transcription which do not correspond to any native structure of Japanese which probably add another 20-30 characters which are also made with structural combinations that make sense. <thi> is a common combination to enter something that has nothing to do with the pronunciation <th> would suggest, but it structurally makes sense.
And then on top of that there are various nonsense accents and other modifications that officially have no place in the standard language but find their way in creative language.
If English had 80 characters in it's script, but the characters so neatly corresponded in a structural way that they could be arranged nicely on a grid, typing methods would probably also rely on combining simpler forms to produce them rather than have a keyboard that spans the full range as it's simply more efficient.
As for Romaji based input, certainly there are some liberties taken based on the logical structure of kana that have been to applied to typing for convenience, but for the most part the Romaji has been chosen for phonetic reasons.
It's also worth noting that from an English perspective the sound you associate with <ti> might be different from the sound a Japanese person might associate with it. Just because the usage isn't strictly the English phonetics, doesn't mean the symbols aren't being used phonetically.
Yet <づ> and <ず> are phonetically indistinct but entered differently; the input scheme is really not based upon phonetics but on structure.
> It's also worth noting that from an English perspective the sound you associate with <ti> might be different from the sound a Japanese person might associate with it. Just because the usage isn't strictly the English phonetics, doesn't mean the symbols aren't being used phonetically.
I think you might confuse the words “phonetic” and “phonemic” here. One can argue that <づ> and ＜ず> are phonemically distinct in modern Japanese but certainly not phonetically, but <お> and <を> are certainly phonemically indistinct and <おう>, <オー> and <おお> are all phonemically and phonetically indistinct as well but entered differently.
More modern linguistic analyses also analyse the sound of <ち> as /ci/ in modern Japanese, due to the almost universal distinction made with <ティ> in modern Japanese, arguing that the historical /t/ has now split in /t/ and /c/, yet /ci/ is entered as <ti> and /ti/ as <thi>, simply because /ti/ is very rare and occurs only in recent borrowings so it makes more sense.
Of course <王> and <追う> sound quite different, but are both entered with <ou> and selecting the appropriate characters from the dropdown.
It really is neither phonetic nor phonemic.
Not sure what what your point is here. ず＆づ may or may not be phonetically indistinct based on region.
> I think you might confuse the words “phonetic” and “phonemic” here.
I mean phonetic more in the layman sense e.g. relates to the sounds, not the most technical linguistic definition. To be blunt, the linguistic definition is silly anyways since literally no natural language will ever strictly meet it.
> It really is neither phonetic nor phonemic.
I guess my original point was that just because you can type certain kana in different ways that may not be strictly phonetic they make sense as simplifications based on the structures you mention, and they make typing easier.
This does not mean you cannot type using inputs that correspond to more strictly phonetic romanizations e.g. hepburn.
In Standard Japanese orthography, all occurrences of <づ> have been replaced with <ず> except where structural reasons remain; the etymology is irrelevant for the orthography and so is the pronunciation in different dialects. In dialects that maintain the distinction between them, many instances of <ず> are pronounced as <づ>, and dialects in general do not follow the standard structure and grammar.
It is absolutely not the case that some actual spoken dialect of Japanese exists somewhere that follows the distinction between them as written in standard Japanese.
> I guess my original point was that just because you can type certain kana in different ways that may not be strictly phonetic they make sense as simplifications based on the structures you mention, and they make typing easier.
They do, but the input method is not based on phonology but on structure and Japanese orthography which does not strictly follow the phonoogy of Japanese.
My point is that it is not entered how it is pronounced in Japanese, but that word in Japanese has an official hiragana speling, which may or may not correspond with how it actually is pronounced, and a system that neatly maps to that spelling is used to enter the characters, not the pronunciation of it.
The official hiragana spelling of such words came before the invention of i.m.e.'s.
> This does not mean you cannot type using inputs that correspond to more strictly phonetic romanizations e.g. hepburn.
I do not subscribe to the theory that Hepburn is more phonetic or phonemic than Kunrei myself; <hu> seems to be a closer approximation for modern Japanse than <fu> in particular than <tyu>, as in “tube” also corresponds better than <chu> as in “chew” to me.
Having said that, that's harder because Hepburn is lossy with regards to the original hiragana orthography and neutralizes <づ> and <ず> among some others.
It's extremely annoying to be honest.
I fully believe that logographic scripts are faster to read once properly mastered, but writing or inputting them is another matter altogether and the article doesn't even begin to touch upon some of the frustrations such as the i.m.e.'s intelligence deciding at the last character to change the educated guess, completely changing the sentence from what intended as one presses “enter” or the inability to type without looking at what one types which is quite possible in many other scripts.
The system tries to be as intelligent as it can and learns from patterns so the guesses are usually correct, but it also means that at times it is unprædictable.
It can also be quite disorienting for a sentence to suddenly shrink or expand considerably as one is typing, and it isn't generally easy to see part of a word one has typed; only when the full word be typed is the proper conversion made and before that point the i.m.e. actually converts it to something entirely differently, often completely misinterpreting the structure of the sentence because a sentence that ends on an incomplete verb is not a sentence grammatically speaking so the i.m.e. doesn't know what to do with it.
Then comes the fact that the i.m.e. is generally very bad with colloquial Japanese as it's conversion rules rely on the grammar of standard textbook Japanese.
Having said that, there is an odd sense of satisfaction to typing Japanese when the i.m.e. agree with the intent of the user. There is something satisfying about a garbled sentence that looks like nothing instantly transforming into a coherent sentence as the last character is added to it.
> I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
Yes, the system is quite a bit different there; as the article says: Japanese characters are primarily arranged in a grid of with a width of 5, so te standard approach there is to drag in one of four directions, or not drag at all to select a character, and a list of possible conversions to Chinese characters is more easily available with a touch screen to select from. In this sense typing Japanese on a mobile phone is actually not any more time consuming than typing English on a mobile phone, but on a keyboard, there are definite problems with it.
Many video games use a custom input form as well as also simply ignore it.
A: [in minecraft chat] "rapisurazuri kudasai!"
B: [talking to themselves] what is that? ra-pi-su-ra-zu-ri-ku-da-sai... aah, I understand.
From a user point of view, you get used to it and it's not so bad after a while. The irritating parts (e.g. having to get back to the middle of your sentence to fix a typo otherwise the surrounding characters are also messed up) are offset by the ease to input emoji, pictograms, or basically any unicode char. you remember the name is a godsend ♡
Typing on a smartphone is more difficult because the keyboard has only 10 keys for characters and you have to tap a key and slide up/down/left/right to chose one of 4 characters.
For input in smartphone, flick input is great way to input but we miss Swype style (or say predicting style) input in Japanese Qwerty keyboard.
Writing Japanese on screen isn't great since Japanese forgetting writing kanjis.
Typing a Japanese word or phrase is just like typing in English, with the exception of selecting the appropriate kanji from a list (no mouse or stylus required). An experienced typist can do this very quickly, on a physical keyboard or on a smartphone.
For a word like "Japanese" (language), i.e., Nihongo or 日本語, it's actually fewer keystrokes than in English: 5 vs. 8, or 9 if you count the space afterward since Japanese doesn't have the same spacing requirements.
I remember being disappointed at the original iPhone since it didn't include a fingerprint scanner, digital wallet/train pass, or video recording support, all of which were available on my Japanese flip-phone that had been released 3 years earlier at less than half the price.
You can also decompose to about 10 strokes, whose order when written is set, so you can map from sequences of those strokes.
The problem with all these input methods IMO is that they're not deterministic and therefore not open loop because that just wasn't one of the design goals.
The additional benefit is that you can apply whatever rules your input method uses to symbols from math or other languages, which IMO is far simpler than using LaTeX syntax if you just want to type a ‰ or ⊥ sign. My input method can type Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Russian as well as some mischellaneous symbols.
Entirely mechanical component based typewriters were being developed in the 50s but never came to fruition. By the time electronic typewriters came along it was decided that it was just cheaper to use the existing physical keyboards designed for Ascii or numpads on phones and work around it with software. This seems to have been a consistent pattern for most languages regardless of the number of symbols or whether they were phonetic. IMO I believe if they had just standardized on a more specialized keyboard layout in the 80s IMEs would not exist. IMO you can likely deterministically type Kanji in a open loop way if there were maybe 2 to 5 times the number of physical keys as the standard, or the same number of physical keys with 4 more shift keys. The advent of predictive text the need for it is basically nil for the majority of people in the same way the majority of people have no need for LaTeX or Vim.
Seems like the whole blog is worth looking through
Probably characters per minute is a better comparison but it's still apples and oranges as you typically need less characters in kanji to spell out the same thing.
I don't understand the common argument that Japanese has no concept of “words”; it is true that Japanese orthography lacks them, but Japanese speakers intuitively agree on where spaces should be put.
I think the real cause of this might simply be that in romanization, it is common to see spaces put where they shouldn't, and that on one end a common way to romanize contrasts with what feels intuitive makes people think that it's a difficult issue with no easy answer, but there is a very easy and solved answer, one that's simply different from the most common form of romanizing outside of linguistic textbooks.
Having said hat, they are no indication for typing speed, but neither are words in English since there can be long and short words too but probably more extreme in Japanese as a sentence that merely consists of a single very long verb would be considered “one word” under this scheme, as that's how it is pronounced prosodically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23898649
But to suggest that makes them the "smart bunch" of east Asians comes off as pretty derisive. Hangul has had its own unique issues with regards to typewriter design which has also been alleviated thanks to IME.
Arabic script, for example, is always cursive script, which requires a computer to link the characters when typed, which is a similar problem that hangul has, where the character blocks are broken down syllabically. You could create a phonetic alphabet keyboard covering every single possibility, but the issue here is that you have over 11,000 possibilities, which in the end puts you in the same predicament that Hanzi and Kanji are in, where you end up with these amusingly difficult to use typewriters.