Typing in Japanese

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

While I can’t comment on typing in Chinese, I can talk about doing it in Japanese, and from what Cecil said in the original column, it seems like the systems are pretty similar.

1.) Any discussion about the number of Chinese characters you need to be functionally literate depends on what language you’re talking about. Japanese, for example, requires about 2000 (there are quite a few more that are written with their pronunciations; there are others that are only needed for specific disciplines). However, in addition to kanji (Chinese characters), Japanese also makes use of two syllabaries of 46 characters each (not including the two-spot and dot varations for voicing and h=>p conversions or a few defunct ones).

2.) With the IME I use, my roman characters are converted to hiragana (one of the syllabaries) as I type, and when I finish a word a hit the spacebar, the hiragana change to the most likely kanji (or combination of hiragana and kanji, or katakana, or stays hiragana). If that’s not what I’m looking for, I press the spacebar again, and it brings up a menu with (theoretically) all possible combinations for what I’ve just entered.

3.) Pressing enter confirms whatever choice you’ve made, whether the original replacement or your selection from the extended menu. If you’re entering something you know you want to stay in hiragana, you can skip the spacebar and just hit enter.

To give you some idea of how this breaks down in keystrokes:

**Japanese written in roman letters: ** Ryuugakusei wa, Nihon no daigaku de wa ryuugakuseibetsuka ka kokusaigakubu ni iresareru. [90 strokes]
**Japanese written in Japanese: ** ???[100 strokes]
**Rough English translation: ** Foreign exchange students at Japanese universities are enrolled in a special division for foreign students or the International Division. [132 strokes]

So really, it isn’t as big a deal as you’d think. What I don’t understand is why Cecil seems to afraid of Japanese. In my opinion, Chinese would be harder to learn, because not only do you have to worry about pitches in the spoken language, but it’s entirely characters; at least with Japanese there’s a chance that if you don’t know how to pronounce a kanji, it’ll have the pronunciation written above or next to it in kana (this is known as furigana and will rapidly become the best friend of any student of the Japanese language). Of course, from what I understand, a character in Chinese only has on pronunciation, whereas in Japanese they vary based on context. (For example, ? has at least six or seven pronunciations; I can only think of four off the top of my head.)

Bottom line? Do kanji make typing in Japanese more difficult than typing in English? The difference is nominal. Is memorizing stacks of them on a weekly basis the bane of my existence? Yes. Would I eliminate them from written Japanese if I could? Hell no. Anybody who’s studied enough Japanese to have started learning kanji knows that it’s much easier to read a sentence written with the appropriate kanji (assuming you know them) than the same sentence written either entirely in kana or roman letters.

Apologies for any lack of cohesion here, but it’s 4:15AM, and I’m getting distracted by the birds singing outside my window. I think there was going to be more, but given that I have to wake up in about six hours to meet a friend in Harajuku, I really should get to sleep. Feel free to call me on anything you think I’m BS-ing on or ask questions on anything I didn’t clearly explain.

2

Your link brought up is Lewis Carrol a perv. Here is the correct link.

3

Since that thread is brought up, might as well add to it.

Come on, it’s not that scary. I will list a few methods used.

Like Japanese, Chinese characters can be typed simlar to how ishokunaeppy explained how to type Japanese. You type in the parts of the character in order, and a list will pop up, then you pick your character, etc. There is a simpler version of this, which is to type the first part of the character and the last part. However, your list might be a bit longer.

For Madarin speakers, they can use the pinyin method to enter Chinese characters on a document. For Cantonese speakers, there is a similar method, which is to enter the prounouciation and a list pops up, etc. However, instead of the just 4 (Madarin) tones, there are 9 tones in Cantonese, with only 6 used commonly.

Another way is to enter the first five strokes of the character, then scroll through a list of matching results. This is pretty easy, given that the strokes are either horizotal, vertical, right-slash, left-slash, or random.

Of course, if you don’t want to type, just buy a handwriting recognition system and write the Chinese characters out. Got to have good handwriting though.

4

Huh, well I guess that’s what happens when you have multiple windows open at 4AM–you link to the wrong one. Thanks!

5

And I guess we know two of ishokunaeppy’s interests for the price of one, now, eh? The Japanese language and … hmm … is it Lewis Carroll, or perverts? The world may never know …

6

Two, two, two mints in one.

Actually, I’m just working my way through all the archives in an effort to avoid getting papers written, but don’t let that stop you from fantasizing.

7

Thanks for posting this, ishokunaeppy. I have two palmtop computers from Japan (a Sharp Zaurus SL-C750, which is Linux-based, and an NTT DoCoMo Sigmarion III, which is Windows CE .NET-based) and I always wondered, before I disabled the Japanese input software, what the “IME” thing meant and what it was actually doing when I would (frequently) accidentally switch into Japanese-input mode and have a list of characters pop up and replace my already-typed characters.

Now I know. Hmmm. It’s almost enough to make me want to learn Japanese. :wink: