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The only problem with that is that the resulting order would be useless for many applications. Say you're looking up your friend Tanaka Tarou, but you're not s
by jpatokal 8y ago
The only problem with that is that the resulting order would be useless for many applications. Say you're looking up your friend Tanaka Tarou, but you're not sure which characters his name is written with. If the sort order is phonetic, you can find the name and likely work out that this is the Tanaka you were looking for. But how do you search for a name in a kanji-indexed list if you don't know the kanji?
Incidentally, this is why kanji dictionaries invariably have multiple indices: one by radical, the other by pronunciation(s).
- cooper12 8y agoGreat point. I was considering a very visual-minded reader but of course not everyone would be so good at it nor would they always just care about how the kanji looks rather than other aspects. It's a difficult problem indeed... My intention is to show that we'd need some sort of radical solution that might not be what we'd immediately jump to (for example the current approach the author mentions is having a separate field for readings, but this is clearly resource-intensive and wouldn't work on arbitrary data). To solve sorting for Japanese, I feel we need to rethink what it means to sort.