How China Sidestepped QWERTY
nature.com
nature.com
I'd suspect that it is the same image that appears on his book in chapter called "Controlling the Kanjisphere", so I guess it covers japanese typewriters:
https://books.google.com/books?id=UTIxDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA207&lpg=...
I also don't like this kind of claim:
> Ultimately, their work led to today's sophisticated predictive-text engines, which benefit from increasing processing power and cloud integration.
I highly doubt the modern IME and text engines ever take any hint from this part of history.
For example, 比如 (= "for example") is typed "xxvk", where "x" → 匕, "v" → 女, "k" → 口. 名字 (= "name") is typed "qkpb", where "q" → 夕, "k" → 口, "p" → 宀， "b" → 子.
Of course most keys can stand for several characters (or components), and it can be hard to tell which one to use (for me), but the amount of ambiguity is surprisingly small.
1. can cover most characters with relative small shape collection 2. use less selection steps 3. easy to learn and memorize
Wubi is optimized on the goal to determine a character with 4 shapes with almost no alternative candidate, so the raw input speed is optimized (4 keystroke for one character, and you don't need to select in most time), but it require a lot of time learning. That enabled typewriter as an job.
Later people found pinyin + good word prediction can achieve acceptable speed, the typewriter job doesn't exist anymore.
However it's still quite painful to input ancient Chinese prose, because most of them are single character word, so you have to select from a long list of characters with same pinyin (in word mode you just input pinyin of two characters, the pinyin combination have much less alternatives). Some pinyin have about 20-30 common used characters, like "ji", "yi" etc.
Japanese similarly is primarily done with QWERTY and an IME. Other layouts do exist but they're not very common.
Chinese input is quite varied though. Taiwan uses Zhuyin (or bopomofo) which is a phonetic alternative that doesn't use Latin. Hong Kong, Cantonese, and/or misc. types of Chinese may use other methods like Cangjie (which does use a QWERTY layout). Cangjie is notable for not being phonetic at all -- likely similar to the typewriter input methods mentioned in the article. Words are typed as ordered sequences of pseudo-radicals (pieces of Chinese characters) that are memorized by their associations to Latin letters and color[0].
Although there's no real reason either Japanese or pinyin IMEs should have to use QWERTY -- in fact it's likely quite suboptimal as neither make use of all the keys, or at least not as a primary function (many IMEs are configurable and/or allow non-standard characters to map to more complex sequences of input). I personally use both through Dvorak (which, being optimized for English, is similarly suboptimal).
As for voice input, Chinese is easier than Japanese because of the larger phonetic inventory and use of tones to form minimal pairs. Although the different types of Chinese (regional dialects (as opposed to different Chinese languages)) and their variations in pronunciation complicate things. Japanese does have pitch accent, but it's not really consistent across Japan, so I don't know how helpful it would actually be for a voice recognition system.
Purely from personal experience, I can rarely get Japanese voice recognition to work if trying to search for a word in isolation. It's quite good with sentences though. This might just be an artifact of my poor pronunciation though.
I think typing in general, as it is now, is pretty primitive and has a lot of room to be improved. I've been tempted to try to make some new, and possibly more efficient, input methods, but haven't been able to justify giving any a try yet. I do think even an IME at the level of what currently exists in Chinese and Japanese would be wonderful to have for English though. Intelligent auto-complete, shortcuts, semantically aware insertion of unicode (Emoji are actually natural to use in IME-using languages; just type what you want and select the emoji that pops up).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#/media/Fi...
[0]:https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Te5RdGMTL...
What I do use it for is entering Unicode characters: press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U to get a fuzzy search over all of Unicode, then type just enough of the description to select the right character in the shortlist, then you can enter it. Much better than googling to copy-paste.
1. Numerous attempts were made by many people, try to encode thousands of Chinese characters in keyboard. The most popular one is Wubi, which can describe single character in 4 keystroke so you don't need to select from options. It's used by professional typewriters, and many regular users spend a lot of time to learn the system.
2. pinyin IME was improved, provided better prediction and word input(input a multi character word directly, instead one by one), it's acceptable even you need to select from a list, and you don't need to learn a system. Most casual users used the one provided by Windows Chinese version.
3. Whole sentence IME appeared, which was trained with Chinese text corpus, try to predict a whole sentence when you just input the pinyin for all of them. This proved to be short-lived since you still need to adjust several places in many cases, even it can get 100% correct in 30% cases.
4. All major IT companies start to develop their own IME as a method to collect user input and provide an entrance to their product.
5. An old IME: double pinyin start to gain more popularity. It's still pinyin, but you can use 2 letter to encode the whole pinyin instead of 4 or 6 letters. All newer IME can switch between different encoding methods, like pinyin, double pinyin, strokes.
6. Senior users tend to just use handwriting in smartphone.
Regarding #5, I found it's difficult to switch from normal pinyin to shuangpin (double pinyin) in one go, and none of the shuangpin methods or software provide staged switching. E.g. a shuangpin IME could allow me to use 'i', 'u' and 'v' to type 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh', but continue to use the existing vowel combinations (e.g. 'ue', 'ao') for stage 1 pinyin/shuangpin typing, and then offer at stage 2 shortcuts for some of the vowel combos only when I had gotten into the habit of the stage 1 shortcuts. Of course the choice of shortcuts available would then be constrained by the staged learning path, but because there's so many different shuangpin IME's available, each with differing key assignments and none of them standard, there's probably still room in the market for a new key assignment that caters to such staged learning.
Notably Ubuntu comes with Dvorak for Japanese as a default, an option I've never seen anywhere else. So there might be special support for your use case. This solution doesn't scale well though.
My keyboards also both have hardware output to Dvorak, which would probably be the best option on other systems. It's been too long since I've used other systems to have a better answer than that though.
From a brief search, hardware transformers do exist, but they seem excessively expensive (QIDO is $150). You can buy a nice keyboard (with the option built in) for less than that price.