I’m not well acquainted with Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) but in many respects Japanese is easier and they do get on the computer.
Japanese uses three (or arguably four now, considering romanization or “romanji”) writing systems: kanji, hirgana and katakana. Kanji are the Chinese characters, exactly as the Chinese use them as it literally means “Chinese Writing” (in Japanese airports you can see Chinese and Japanese communicating by writing the kanji - as with Cantonese and Mandarin, spoken Japanese differs wildly from any Chinese.)
Historically spoken Japanese is different from Chinese, so when the Japanese imported Kanji from China, they had to be “grafted” onto the spoken Japanese language. This was done with Kana. Kana, (Hiragana and Katakana) is syllabic. So it’s similar to a (large) alphabet. Each kana character represents a sound (a constant plus a vowel, except for m and n). It’s said that a Buddist monk devoloped kana when he visited China to study and went into southern China, close to India, and saw Indian script.
Katakana is made up of straight lines and is considered masculine, while Hiragana is rounded, feminine. For the most part, katakana is used for foreign words (terebi = television, rajio = radio) and hiragana for Japanese words.
Small children entering kindergarden have to have the Hiragana and Katakana charts memorized plus five kanji. Most children’s things (coloring books, video games, comics) are written in kana. Individuals sign their names in any of the three systems. The phonetic system is what makes Japanese easier - it works just like an alphabet, except it uses phonetic sounds and is thus larger (i.e., “b” would be: bi, ba, bo, bu, be).
Which leads to computers. My understanding is that there is some kanji they use often - others can be accessed via something like Window’s character map. Some people use English style keyboards and Japanese software.
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The column (including Slug Signorino’s illustration) can also be found on pages 177-180 of Cecil Adams? book «Triumph of the Straight Dope».
When I installed MacOS 9.0.4 on my Mac at home I installed all the language kits. Now in the keyboard drop-down menu I have a whole slew of options (e.g. Ukrainian, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, etc…). I just went and tried out the Japanese option. For hiragana and katakana, it automatically translates the typed-in syllable to the corresponding japanese letter. e.g. if I typed in the three letters s,h,i I saw the japanese letter shi, or if I typed in the letter n,o I saw the japanese letter no. It looked like there was a facility for also entering some kanji characters but since the help was all in japanese I couldn’t figure out how it works.
There’s also a Unicode hex input and an extended Roman unicode input. I’ll have to try to find a place where this is documented so I can figure it out. Has anyone used these options in the MacOS?
Arnold - find out more than you ever wanted to know about Unicode at http://www.unicode.org
Specifically regarding how Chinese characters can be typed into a computer, allow me to quote from The Master himself:
In the subtle and brilliant fashion that is Cecil’s norm, he alludes to the answer already - that is, you type in the strokes. If one analyzes the component strokes that make up each Chinese word, one will soon realize that there really aren’t that many - basically, horizontal and vertical lines, diagonals (each with variations in lengths), and dots, so they can all be mapped onto a plain-ol’ QWERTY keyboard. I know of at least one company, RichWin, (the site’s in Chinese, whaddya expect) that makes software to do just that - and all a user has to do is type them out in the same sequence used in handwriting.
The programme I used in Japan was called “ichi taro”. You typed in the sound (using roman letters) and a list of Kanji appeared across the bottom of the screen. You scroll across and press the space bar to insert the correct symbol.
Wrong. No Chinese software uses a stroke-by-stroke method to enter characters. There would be way too many ambiguities, because positioning of the strokes is just as important as what the strokes are (even in English; compare the strokes of “a”, “d”, and “q”); and there would also be too much wasted information, as you don’t need ALL the strokes to uniquely identify a character.
The input method that comes closest to this is the Cangjie system ( one helpful site: http://www.cjmember.com/ ). It uses common stroke groups instead of individual strokes, and uses a limited number of them instead of attempting to describe each character fully. Each character can be typed in less than five keystrokes on a QWERTY keyboard.
But Cangjie is only one of many Chinese input methods (although one of the few that is independent of the Chinese dialect one speaks). According to RichWin’s site
( http://richwin.sina.com.cn/products/wind_97/index_b5.html ), their software supports (my translation) “multiple easy and practical Chinese input methods, including multi-base Pinyin, multi-base double Pinyin, Internal Code, Five-Stroke, Cantonese Pinyin, Area Position/Internal Code, English/Han, Cangjie, Simplified Cangjie, Zhuyin, Renzhi Code, Motion Status Keyboard, and about ten other methods.” So RichWin isn’t advocating a single input method, but rather is accommodating as many systems as possible.
Of that list, the oldest two are Cangjie and Zhuyin, which I explained in a previous comment on Cecil’s articles at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=51085 (Well, arguably, Internal Code [Neima] is older, but that input method consists of finding your character on a giant table, finding a four-digit code for it, and typing that code in. Not really something that most people could type fast in.)
I would imagine a decent voice recognition system could become very popular, if they could get the accuracy % closer to 100. Certainly would be a good alternative to keyboard systems. Or they could just use English
Voice recognition systems in Chinese are particularly difficult to develop because so many character groups are homophones; they’re written differently but sound the same. (Cecil mentions this in his column.) Some exist, and I think they’re about as popular among affluent Chinese as English voice recognition systems are among affluent English speakers – i.e., not very.
Another telling reason against it: Some weeks ago I downloaded the Microsoft Speech SDK. It was all one bundle, I had to get all languages supported. One was Chinese. Out of curiosity, I did a bit of snooping--422 sounds IIRC. That compares to about 50 for English. It can be hard enough to tell the difference between some English words, imagine how close some Chinese words must be.
My wife has tried to teach me some, but she'll tell me I'm saying it wrong and I can't hear the difference between what she says I'm saying and what she says is correct.
To add to the mess, meaning is often determined from context.
I speak Cantonese, Toishan, some Mandarin and have lived in China. Written Chinese in early grades is taught with a romanization scheme called PinYin. As I understand it, it’s dropped in later grades, but it has been shown to aid in learning Chinese. Chinese word processing uses a qwerty keyboard in which the operator types the word in pinyin. A list of characters that has that pronunciation is shown and the operator picks the character he/she is looking for. SA for other computer use, comps are generally used my the “educated” and business people, that is those who have college educations and thus know some English.
It was claimed on Millionaire that China has the greatest number of English speakers. WHile this is technically true based on some loose interpretation of what constitutes speaking English, I would not like your average Chinese,say , say call the American consulate after I and my bicycle having been run oover by a waterbuffalo!
As for Chinese typwriters THAT’S a whole other thing! They are impressive. It’s a big tray of metal type in which a mini-crane like device picks up the type and is struck and then replaced back in place. It’s said proficient typist can type about 15 words a minute.
I have never seen of nor heard of a method by which strokes are placed with a key board. Writing CHinese not only requires the correct strokes in the correct place but also written in the correct order. Hence I understand there are programs for plam computers that recognized characters based on stroke and order.
I almost worked for a company in San Jose that makes those touchpads that come with some laptops.
They are also working on the software for a chinese character recognition system. Users would write the character on something similar to a touchpad with a stylus. Then after 5-8 strokes the software would be able to recognize the character (or at least narrow it down to a few choices). The dictionary would only conatin ~8,000 chinese characters however.
Seems like it would greatly improve the usability of computers for chinese speakers.
Aaaargh! It makes my head want to explode =)
As for the homophones, they’re all over the place in Japanese. One comes to mind immediately, kame (turtle, jar) and kami (god, paper). I wanted to pun off the name and make Kame Kami, who could defeat Gamera (thank you Black and White! http://www.bwgame.com)
