Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!steelhead.cs.washington.edu!chou From: chou@steelhead.cs.washington.edu (Pai Hsiang Chou) Subject: Re: the interface for the rest of us? Message-ID: <1991May4.225459.20904@beaver.cs.washington.edu> Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle References: <9105021606.AA26962@lti2.lti.uucp> Date: Sat, 4 May 91 22:54:59 GMT In article mh2f+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Mark Hahn) writes: >there may be a market for technophobes in this country, >but pens are practically a necessity for ideographic writing, like Japan. >currently, the state of the art for typing kanji is to enter >an English transcription, which is then converted into the Japanese >syllabic alphabet (kana) and finally into Kanji (the latter >is a many-many mapping.) not surprisingly, vast categories >of the software market in Japan are sparse, since there's no general >demand for such a clumsy system. > >regards, mark It is NOT a necessity, just easy of learning. In Taiwan, where traditional Chinese characters are used, the most popoular input method is a stroke based system which assigns shapes to the keys, and any character can be entered using anywhere between 1 to 5 keys, unambiguously. It is very efficient once mastered. The champion from a recent contest was a 17-year-old girl who could enter 190+ Chinese characters a minute. However, this input method requires about 3 months of training, so the learning curve is quite high. Pai Chou chou@june.cs.washington.edu