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Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sou

by kurthr 4y ago

Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sounds so you can put it on a standard keyboard by just flicking lf-dn-rt-up (for ee-oh-eh-u) or pressing for "ah" to get all the hiragana (well except for accent marks). Everything fits in 12 buttons so it's been used since flip phones. Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite. Here's a native demonstrating typing on an iPhone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps: https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/1134460840697053184 https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/11344608406970531...

frosted-flakes 4y ago
I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter. A T I del O E S space cap N ,.?! enter Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient. I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
- samus 4y ago
  The smartphone era is simply very young still. The QUERTY keyboard is fast enough for most use cases, but without autocomplete it's pretty much broken on smartphones. Optimized systems exist though, for example the MessageEase keyboard. It's almost exactly how you describe, but capitalization is done by circling or by swiping back and forth. Court writers have more advanced systems, but they also take a lot more equipment and more time to become fluent with.
- lozenge 4y ago
  There used to be a lot of experimental keyboards but the invention of swipe typing seems to have killed most of them. https://gizmodo.com/12-smartphone-keyboards-that-are-trying-to-reinvent-mob-1695151919 https://gizmodo.com/12-smartphone-keyboards-that-are-trying-...
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  This has been implemented, since PalmOS days, as MessageEase Keyboard. I still use it on Android. It can even be configured to allow one-stroke access to loads of special characters, two-step composition of accents/diacriticals (and some ligatures), and easy access to Ctrl and Alt combinations. The last bit doesn't get understood by some Android programs. The settings are a bit extensive, and several languages are supported. Unfortunately, I haven't found an open source equivalent.

by kurthr 4y ago

frosted-flakes 4y ago

I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter. A T I del O E S space cap N ,.?! enter Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient. I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.

samus 4y ago
The smartphone era is simply very young still. The QUERTY keyboard is fast enough for most use cases, but without autocomplete it's pretty much broken on smartphones. Optimized systems exist though, for example the MessageEase keyboard. It's almost exactly how you describe, but capitalization is done by circling or by swiping back and forth. Court writers have more advanced systems, but they also take a lot more equipment and more time to become fluent with.
lozenge 4y ago
There used to be a lot of experimental keyboards but the invention of swipe typing seems to have killed most of them. https://gizmodo.com/12-smartphone-keyboards-that-are-trying-to-reinvent-mob-1695151919 https://gizmodo.com/12-smartphone-keyboards-that-are-trying-...
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
This has been implemented, since PalmOS days, as MessageEase Keyboard. I still use it on Android. It can even be configured to allow one-stroke access to loads of special characters, two-step composition of accents/diacriticals (and some ligatures), and easy access to Ctrl and Alt combinations. The last bit doesn't get understood by some Android programs. The settings are a bit extensive, and several languages are supported. Unfortunately, I haven't found an open source equivalent.