How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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This is a response to:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_177.html

“This is just Chinese we’re talking about. Japanese, now . . . they say Japanese is really complicated. Sad to say, we do not have space to discuss it here. Just get down on your knees and thank G-O-D for the A-B-C’s.”

Ah come on Cecil. You are at your best in wit, not sarcasm! You really missed the boat on that comment. Japanese is actually simplistic compared to Chinese!

First: They have a phonetic alphabet. It’s called Kana. Some uneducated people consider it complex because there are 2 character sets (called Hiragana and Katakana) but the reality is they represent the same exact sounds, just like the difference between Uppercase and lowercase in English (although they use them for different reasons.) It is possible to write a statement using only Hiragana (the commonly used set) and be perfectly fine.

Second: They only have 2 pitch modulations. Plus the pitch is more like an accent and doesn’t change the meaning of the word, unlike Chinese. For example, having the wrong pitch in Japanese would be no different than putting the accent in the wrong place in English. For example, I pronounced the word “syllable” like this: sih-la-ble instead of sil-ah-ble, you would still be able to understand what I was saying. You would just think I was a moron. So when it comes to computing and typing the pitch is completely irrelevant. They know what pitch to use the same way we know what syllable to accent.

The only think that makes Japanese complex is that they borrowed about 2500 characters from Chinese. These serve more like shortcuts than anything else. Most keyboards in Japan have just the Hiragana characters on them and are used vary similar to ours. They have a special system to enter the Chinese characters (know as Kanji) but its relatively simplistic and you don’t absolutely have to use it. I have the program installed on my computer. After typing a word you have the choice of simply hitting the enter key to keep going (since the Japanese don’t use spaces this doesn’t cause anymore time than say hitting the space bar between words) or you can hit a conversion key to pop up a quick menu of the Kanji words that match the Hiragana you just typed, which in many situations is just one or two possible words, plus to make it even easier most editors have a built in mini dictionary to remind the typist what those characters mean in case they forgot.

Maybe a little more complex than English, but if you study the language it actually is far more logical and has **a lot ** less irregular verbs/letters/spellings/etc.

Next time check before you generalize a set of languages that seem to the untrained eye to be the same.

An example of Japanese Kana and Kanji:
These all represent ‘watashi’ the Japanese word for ‘I’
わたし　This is Hiragana.
ワタシ　This is Katakana (almost like I was writing in all CAPS but a little different in connotation to the Japanese)
私　　　　This is Kanji. The inclusion of the Chinese characters actually helps shorten sentence length.
All of these I was able to type in seconds because of the sytem I detailed above.

Luke

PS I own a shirt you would probably love. It says:
“Those of you who think you know everything
really annoy those of us that do”
Yes, I am aware that there is a grammar error, but alas the
shirt was made by some who thinks he does for people who do.

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I know a little about Japanese, and enough to know that it has complexities that Chinese does not have. The biggest complexity is that Chinese characers used in Japanese (kanji) can be read often be read in several different ways. Sometimes you will know from the context which reading to use, but with Chinese characters used for personal names you have to be told the reading with furagana (hiragana characters written next to the kanji), or you have to look it up in a dictionary.

Secondly, while you can type katakana and hiragana using a keyboard the same size as a Latin alpabet keyboard, for kanji you need an extra element, a program which will tell you the possible choices after you’ve typed the hiragana. It certainly means that you need to know the language. (I could type Russian – slowly – using a Cyrillic keyboard from a Russian original without knowing any Russian, but I would not be able to type either Chinese or Japanese from an original with Chinese characters without knowing what the characters sound like, unless I had an enormous keyboard, or I used some other trick like typing in radicals).

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Dude, thats what I was pretty much saying. The point is that in his article Cecil made the claim that Japanese was MORE complex than Chinese, which is bologna.

All Japanese word processing tools has some form of conversion to put in the Kanji and yes, you do need to know them to get the right ones…but they almost always include a mini-dictionary to tell you what the Kanji mean, in case you forgot.

Plus of course if you don’t know any Japanes you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re just gonna write gibberish. The average Japanese keyboard has almost the same number of keys as the average English keyboard.

Luke

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I have always been told that writing all in Hiragana was, in pre-modern times, a sign that the writer was a woman (women’s tiny little fluffy female brains couldn’t possibly handle Kanji, don’cha know?), and, in modern times, a sign that the writer is using a primitive computer that can’t handle Kanji.

Not relevant to the subject of writing.

And, on the other hand, a complex series of honorifics, different grammar depending on the age and sex of the speaker, even a special grammar for speaking of the death of the emperor. All natural languages are complex.

There’s no grammatical error there.

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Hmm…since it’s not pre-modern times and since most people aren’t using Toshiba T 200’s anymore, that’s beside the point. I said what I said to point out that the basic form of their language is no different than ours or the tons of other phonetic based “alphabetic” languages. Cecil seems to think that Japanese is like most other Oriental languages which rely on pictographic “alphabets” that are amazing complex and hard to learn.

I beg to differ. As Cecil so correctly pointed out, in order to get the correct Hanzi (Chinese Pictogram {word}) the Chinese computer user must be able to acertain pronunciation variation to let the computer know what he is looking for. The Japanese don’t have this problem because of the reasons I detailed.

Sorta…I could debate the inanity and insanity of English grammar and vocabulary all night long…but the point of this post was not that all languages are complex…but rather that Japanese is not nearly as complex to type on the computer as Chinese is. Granted, Japanese is a bit more complex than English but it is a far cry from Chinese. It blows my mind that any one in China can read, let alone type and word process!

He he he he…its so simple yet so subtle…most people don’t even catch it. Kudo to the first person who figures it out!!!

Luke

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Kudos to the person who figures it out.
Geez, I spent 20 minutes making sure I got all the mistakes then I missed that…
Luke

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that

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Not so. There is nothing wrong with the “that” there. This is just another one of the silly lies about English grammar made up by bored schoolmarms with nothing better to do.

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I have a chinese word processor. I just type in the pinyin (which is sort of the phonetical equivalent of the word in letters) and a list of characters which are pronounced using that pinyin are shown. If the character I am after is first in the list, I press the spacebar. If it is not the first one, I press the number which is shown next to it. It’s quite quick, and not difficult. You can also type in words comprising two characters (before pressing spacebar), which makes the first choice displayed even more accurate.

I can’t really comment on the Japanese way of word processing, but I thought you’d like to know how it is done with Chinese WPs (mine at least).

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Okay, I just read Cecil’s column (Probably should have done that first hmm?). He makes it sound really difficult, but if you are a chinese student (as in a student of the chinese language), it’s really not hard at all. I can type chinese quite quickly.

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Yeah, I’m going to have to side with the people who say it’s relatively easy to type in Chinese, provided one has the necessary program. I’m not going to say that it’s easier or harder to understand than Japanese or English, but it’s certainly not hard to type.

bamf

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我试验一下，看看能不能用中文来发表
i was trying to wrote in chinese…
:cool:

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BTW, if you have Microsoft Office, you can download the free IME (input method editor) that allows you to type Chinese using various methods.

The other thing about typing Chinese is that Chinese tends to di-syllabisize words. That is, use two syllables instead of one for clarity. An example would be equivalent of “walk on the road” instead of “walk” or “eat rice” instead of “eat”. Chinese is a tonal language, but when one uses a two syllable word, the possible combinations drop dramatically.

Also programs like Office are reasonably smart and tend to correctly select the correct characters when you type in an entire sentence.

Some people can type Chinese almost as fast as a roman alphabet. It’s pretty amazing.