3 ms·

Japanese was first written in kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), with the syllabaries created hundreds of years later. Though you could say modern Japanese is

Japanese was first written in kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), with the syllabaries created hundreds of years later. Though you could say modern Japanese is encoded as a syllabary.

Tarean 10y ago
Do you happen to know how japanese input methods generally work? I have seen chinese and japanese steno machines before, e.g. chorded strokes that cover one or more sillables. That takes specific hardware and a bunch of training, though, so I'd guess it isn't the primary one.
- gcr 10y ago
  I'm a beginning Japanese learner. I really know nothing about the language. But here is how it might be typed (at least by a non-expert like me): Suppose you're sitting at a keyboard with Roman letters. If you want to type a sentence, you might first type the "anofuyuhataihensamui" keys. The IME would convert that into a stream of Hiragana characters as you type to get あのふゆはたいへんさむい. To do that with a cell phone, you would have to press keypad keys to get the character you want. This isn't too bad since there are only 46 basic Hiragana characters. iOS and android have nice "flick" interfaces for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LY0-8-PXSc#t=125s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LY0-8-PXSc#t=125s These interfaces are efficient because they're adapted to the small set of Hiragana characters you write. Some teenagers can (painstakingly) write entire novels on the cell phone like that. Hiragana characters can express all the sounds of the Japanese language. Unfortunately, they're not very readable because there are no visible word breaks and because Japanese has lots of homonyms. To make the above readable, you need to make a second pass over the sentence you wrote, converting ふゆ into 冬 and たいへん into 大変 and さむい into 寒い with the arrow keys and space bar. I think it's common to do this after every word so you don't get too far behind. At the end, you get the sentence you want: あの冬は大変寒い, after a dozen or so keystrokes of overhead. Some modern IMEs try their best to convert kana to kanji as you type. Apple's Japanese IME, for example, converts that sentence without any extra input. But frequently you have to do at least a little bit of post-processing. I think it's common for actual Japanese people to type using an American keyboard by inputting the romanization of the words they use. There are keyboards that have one key per hiragana character, but I think they're not as common. From what I understand, Chinese is frequently typed with Pinyin, another romanization scheme. There are more challenges though: first, the lack of a syllabry like Hiragana means there's no intermediate representation. Second, Mandarin uses tones on each syllable which aren't captured in Latin letters. This can also be different between different dialects and geographic locations. Taiwan, for example, has some interesting differences compared to mainland China: https://www.quora.com/Do-Taiwanese-use-Pinyin https://www.quora.com/Do-Taiwanese-use-Pinyin

Japanese was first written in kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), with the syllabaries created hundreds of years later. Though you could say modern Japanese is encoded as a syllabary.

Tarean 10y ago

Do you happen to know how japanese input methods generally work? I have seen chinese and japanese steno machines before, e.g. chorded strokes that cover one or more sillables. That takes specific hardware and a bunch of training, though, so I'd guess it isn't the primary one.

gcr 10y ago
I'm a beginning Japanese learner. I really know nothing about the language. But here is how it might be typed (at least by a non-expert like me): Suppose you're sitting at a keyboard with Roman letters. If you want to type a sentence, you might first type the "anofuyuhataihensamui" keys. The IME would convert that into a stream of Hiragana characters as you type to get あのふゆはたいへんさむい. To do that with a cell phone, you would have to press keypad keys to get the character you want. This isn't too bad since there are only 46 basic Hiragana characters. iOS and android have nice "flick" interfaces for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LY0-8-PXSc#t=125s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LY0-8-PXSc#t=125s These interfaces are efficient because they're adapted to the small set of Hiragana characters you write. Some teenagers can (painstakingly) write entire novels on the cell phone like that. Hiragana characters can express all the sounds of the Japanese language. Unfortunately, they're not very readable because there are no visible word breaks and because Japanese has lots of homonyms. To make the above readable, you need to make a second pass over the sentence you wrote, converting ふゆ into 冬 and たいへん into 大変 and さむい into 寒い with the arrow keys and space bar. I think it's common to do this after every word so you don't get too far behind. At the end, you get the sentence you want: あの冬は大変寒い, after a dozen or so keystrokes of overhead. Some modern IMEs try their best to convert kana to kanji as you type. Apple's Japanese IME, for example, converts that sentence without any extra input. But frequently you have to do at least a little bit of post-processing. I think it's common for actual Japanese people to type using an American keyboard by inputting the romanization of the words they use. There are keyboards that have one key per hiragana character, but I think they're not as common. From what I understand, Chinese is frequently typed with Pinyin, another romanization scheme. There are more challenges though: first, the lack of a syllabry like Hiragana means there's no intermediate representation. Second, Mandarin uses tones on each syllable which aren't captured in Latin letters. This can also be different between different dialects and geographic locations. Taiwan, for example, has some interesting differences compared to mainland China: https://www.quora.com/Do-Taiwanese-use-Pinyin https://www.quora.com/Do-Taiwanese-use-Pinyin