This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 hashi, "bridge") in her own name.
Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite.
Here's a native demonstrating typing on an iPhone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY
On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps:
https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/11344608406970531...
A T I del
O E S space
cap N ,.?! enter
I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
Optimized systems exist though, for example the MessageEase keyboard. It's almost exactly how you describe, but capitalization is done by circling or by swiping back and forth.
Court writers have more advanced systems, but they also take a lot more equipment and more time to become fluent with.
https://gizmodo.com/12-smartphone-keyboards-that-are-trying-...
Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'.
A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet.
The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors. How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese? When people make the sort of mistakes made by those less educated people mentioned above does their writing end up similarly readable, i.e. are ideographic scripts similarly robust in the face of transmission errors?
Well, sometimes. There are plenty of single-character errors in English that could change meaning though: Presence of absence of a comma, asymptomatic vs symptomatic, bat vs bet, etc.
Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?
The one I chose was a tongue-in-cheek absurdity. There are other cases where there actually is ambiguity.
For example, it's common to see people in mainland China that cannot write 餐 (can1, meal) correctly, but I never experienced any issue with that in real life.
In addition, I read and write simplified Chinese natively, but I can read traditional Chinese with little difficulty, and even a little bit of Japanese with high kanji density. The characters have evolved significantly, but the remaining similarity is still enough for me to parse the text.
For Chinese, it’s usually not difficult. If a stroke or two is off, or if it’s the wrong radical, you can usually figure out pretty quickly with a similar effort to a misspelled word what they meant from context. If they incorrectly used a homonym, you likewise can tell pretty quickly, like “queue” vs. “cue”.
In Chinese this partly happens because you don’t just memorize individual characters, you also memorize pairs/clusters of characters as the actual semantic units.
In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
> rediculous
In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
The reason for this, which I think most westerners won't immediately understand, is because Japanese (and Chinese scripts in general) doesn't use spaces nor capitalization.
What do I mean by "doesn't use spaces no capitalization"? Think of English, but without either: canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish. A sentence written purely in hiragana reads like that.
Kanji serves the same function spaces and capitalization does for us, they distinguish individual words from each other.
Some words are written entirely in hiragana for brevity or style, but generally speaking the purpose of hiragana is to string the kanji together and add contextual information so the sentence flows well.
On that note, all foreign words are written in katakana, and katakana is also used for emphasis, similar to ALL CAPS or bold writing in English.
This is very legible for a native english speaker
The actual problem without using spaces is not that humans can't read it, it's that computers can't read it (without at least complete dictionary and maybe some AI help). GNU aspell for instance does not support languages that don't use spaces.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeCab
Like you said, it does come with a dictionary to work properly.
After more practice I've found myself starting to pick up on common dividers, like particles, verb endings, adjective endings, etc. I assume native speakers do this instinctually, much like native English readers aren't really reading letter by letter (wichh is why txet lkie tihs is rbleadae at ntiave seepd for most)
After a quick search, there is at least some research out there that suggests that Chinese readers are able to read faster than English readers, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1938807990955829.... This comes at a cost though, and that is the time spent learning how to write, but maybe technology like word processors will reduce that cost while retaining the benefits.
I wrote that example as an attempt to frame how Japanese scripts are written compared to English. If you thought it had anything to do with superiority and inferiority, you read between the lines too much.
Spaces can be used, especially in modern times and are sometimes used for even better readability, but generally and historically Japanese script is one connected string of characters with no breaks except for the occasional punctuation and line breaks.
A connected string of nothing but hiragana and katakana is very infuriating to read, with or without spaces, and as a practical concern the issue manifests quite frequently in any piece of longer-form writing that contains lots of foreign words (because foreign words are all written in katakana).
c a n y o u r e a d t h i s e a s i l y i d i d n t t h i n k s o e i t h e r n o b o d y w r i t e s l i k e t h i s i n e n g l i s h
might get the feeling across a bit better?
When talking, Japanese speakers can usually tell homophones apart based on the context. In written form, kanji make it much faster to understand what a given word means: for anything more complex than children’s books, it is actually quite hard to understand Japanese text written in a purely phonetic system (kana or latin).
kanji is useful training for visual memory and can be used to provide memory pegs
I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.
But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.
Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Mats...
Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ...
Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
- UI animations sliding/folding (e.g. 1Hz interactivity vs 120Hz interactivity).
- MS Windows default keyboard settings with slowed down key repeat rate.
- corporate firewalls configured to DROP instead of REJECT the LAN traffic.
- latency to access office documents in the cloud.
- MS Teams bugs frustrations.
- increased number of mouse clicks in WIN11 to reach common functions.
- other software bugs/annoyances we cannot fix, c.g Jonathan Blow.
I'm not sure how to do it but the clicks need to be processed against the state of the display when the click was done rather than against the state when the click was processed. The only way to do this that comes to mind is to snapshot the hot zones on the screen before doing anything that will disrupt the screen and any click received during or within 300ms (configurable, I'm figuring a minimum reaction time) after the screen update should be processed against that map, not against the current state.
If 1 billion current MS Windows users would make daily 1000 UI operations, but each time wait 100 ms for UI animations, the collective wasted time on the animations would be 3000 years of collective wasted time.
Fortunately most are just watching movies and shopping online, so not much collective _productive_ time is wasted ;)
1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.)
2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive.
3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary.
That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.