Sauli Hirvi wrote:
> Interesting and quite understandable.
> How does the system actually work on phones?
> How do you input kanji? Do you type multiple
> chars to form one or is there a menu system
> of some sort?
Japan has 50 basic phonetic characters which can be thought of as 10 consonants
x 5 vowels.
Each key is a consonant, multiple clicks cycle through the values.
Once the word has been spelled out, a conversion/function key is used to
convert the word in kanji.
For example, the '2' key is 'k', so pressing 2 once is 'ka', twice is 'ki',
etc.
To input the kanji for sakana:
3,2,5, convert
To input chimimouryou:
4,4,7,7,7,7,7,7,71,1,1,9,9,8,8,8,1,1,1,convert
Now, when I write it out like this it sounds quite cumbersome, especially to
foreigners who have no experience with multi-step input,
but for Japanese "lack of keyboard" is rarely a complaint about cellphones, and
it certainly doesn't stop users from writing lots of mails, etc.
In fact, I would argue that asian languages that use kanji are much better at
communicating lots of information quickly and cheaply; several characters can
convey entire news stories, making for example short news headlines very
informative and cheap and easy to send/read.
Besides which, most mobile users in Japan, unlike Westerners, have no prior
keyboard experience and are therefore not biased towards a qwerty keyboard. As
I often say, using chopsticks isn't hard, even if you've never seen a fork,
although fork users can't imagine chopsticks being easy to use.
r e n
--
ascii: r e n f i e l d
octal: \162 \145 \156 \146 \151 \145 \154 \144
hex: \x72 \x65 \x6e \x66 \x69 \x65 \x6c \x64
morgan stanley dean witter japan
e-business technologies | engineering and strategy
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Received on Fri Sep 8 02:36:48 2000