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> <Uc8Btjq00Vpb8IIFME@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Sat, 4 May 91 22:54:59 GMT

In article <Uc8Btjq00Vpb8IIFME@andrew.cmu.edu> 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
