Re: [9fans] input methods for non-ascii languages

[Anthony Mandic <og@hotmail.com>]

"boyd, rounin" wrote:

> japanese is a special case 'cos it has 4 character sets:
> 
>     - hiragana [phonetic set for japanese words]
>     - katakana [phonetic set for foreign words]

	These two could be considered to be different cases for the
	same syllabic sound. So they'd be something akin to upper and
	lower case in European character sets (although I don't know
	how they are actually generated on Japanese keyboards, I had
	thought it might be by using the shift key). Hence one character
	set.

>     - kanji [the ideographs]
>     - romaji [romanised representation]
> 
> i've seen numerous systems and keyboards for doing this
> and other things (the various japanese on 9fans know better
> than i, obviously) and it's pretty nasty.
> 
> some keyboards have the kana imposed on a qwerty keyboard
> and you use a 'shift' key to get at them.
>
> for typing the kanji, well the system i like is that you type the
> stem of the pronounciation and you then cycle through a
> set of ideographs until the one you want turns up.  i'm
> not sure, but there should be no reason why such a
> system couldn't sort them by frequency, on a personalised
> basis.

	I recall seeing a science show on the (Australian) ABC a
	few years back where a team from an Australian university
	came up with using the numeric keypad and working off
	stroke order. Since Chinese characters have specific strokes
	and a stroke order, they claimed it was easy to assign the
	strokes to the numeric keys and let the computer determine
	the character from the stroke order. I don't know what became
	of this method - perhaps it just never took off.

> iirc the basic set of kanji is around 800, then there's a jump
> to 2000 and most newspapers use around 6000.
> 
> reading them is hard enough, but in writing them you have
> to remember the 'stroke order', not some random set of
> strokes that will get you the character (this goes for the
> kana as well, but they are simple).

	Stroke order isn't too hard and easy to learn once you get
	the hang of it. Its fairly natural actually. What I found
	to be hard was getting the correct pronunciation of the kanji.
	Since you had On and Kun etc. it wasn't easy.

-am	© 2003