I wanted to go offtopic in the How can I input hiragana 'zu' (from tsu)? thread and decided a new thread would be better.

Megaqwerty Wrote:However, I would recommend that you don't actually attempt to use hiragana input (vs. romanji input) on an English keyboard. After you learn how to touchtype, it's not too bad, but if you don't know the layout, it's extremely difficult to learn it, especially if you cannot simply look down to see it, as you won't be able to with an English keyboard. The concept is sound though: in theory, you would halve the amount of keystrokes needed to type something, but once you consider dakuten and whatnot, the efficiency is really not that different.

Approach wapuro with a Japanese perspective and it, mostly, makes sense. I'm currently trying to cut out superfluous letters (like the h in shi and s in tsu), but it's pretty hard, heh.

I have never met anyone in Japan who uses the direct kana input method. I am sure the people must be out there or every keyboard would not come with kana printed on the keys. I would love to know if anyone has encountered a person who can actually use it as opposed to romaji->kana method.

This got me thinking about other IMEs out there. I know some IMEs for Chinese were an even bigger pain then romaji->kana/kanji

As far as I know there is PinYin where you type "wan2" and then pick a character from a (sometimes huge) list. There is Bopomofo where you type odd shapes that correspond somewhat to pinyin to represent sounds and then chose a pitch key (this is the most common method I found in Taiwan) then you pick from a similar list. Then, also in Taiwan, I met a woman that uses the Cangjie method (I know there is a simplified Cangjie too) which seemed to me the most efficient way to type Chinese at the time. There would be a learning curve for this though. I could see a connection drawn between this method and Heisig (or similar) methods of deconstruction.

What are the most common methods used by the students of Chinese here?
Does anyone know if "bopomofo" is used at all on the mainland?
Does anyone use direct kana input?
Is there a Japanese IME similar to Cangjie? Would there even be a need for such a thing?

"kigou"

then, ＄℃Я〇ΓΓ!

When I still studied Chinese I used the PinYin system. It is my understanding that this is the most common system, at least in the west. The computers at my university that were setup for foreign students also used PinYin (for simplified Chinese at least).

I think BoPoMoFo is the IME layout of choice in Taiwan, but the BoPoMoFo alphabet is not commonly used in any country other than Taiwan.

I tried to use kana input for about a week, but it's a bit pointless. I've never met a Japanese person who uses it, or a Japanese person who can touch type in either layout.
Having a BoPoMoFo keyboard makes a bit more sense because there are only 37 letters (as opposed to 46 kana).

I've also never met anyone who uses the kana input. Here at Elementary school they teach the romaji method, so I doubt that's going to change anytime soon.

I guess having it on keyboards is just a hangover from when the two methods were in competition.

Equally, I've never seen any Japanese person who touch types. They're all hunt/peck types. I guess having to stop every few words to select a kanji is the cause.

Mighty_Matt Wrote:Equally, I've never seen any Japanese person who touch types. They're all hunt/peck types. I guess having to stop every few words to select a kanji is the cause.

I think the main cause is an almost total lack of computer/typing education in any level of school, combined with a relative lack of computers in home life (people would rather use their keitai). Having to select kanji can't be the cause as I can touchtype in Japanese just fine, albeit not as quickly as in English.

I've met plenty of Japanese people who can touch type.

The coolest method for Chinese input is WuBi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

It's claimed to be the fastest but is relatively more difficult to master... AND you have to know how to write your characters because pinyin doesn't come into it...

Boy that Wubi article is poorly written.

Quote:Having to select kanji can't be the cause as I can touchtype in Japanese just fine, albeit not as quickly as in English.

I think the potential gain from learning touch typing for Japanese is less than for English since there is so much stopping and moving around the keyboard, so I can see why it would be less attractive to a Japanese person.

As Jarvik sort of said, I think home computers hold a slightly different role in Japan and are not as prevalent. I have been surprised at the number of young adults I meet who are nearly computer illiterate. Japan is also a little bit behind the west. When the US was going through its AOL craze about a decade ago, personal computers were still an extreme rarity over here.

[ファブリス]

Hey Serge, very interesting link on Wubi !

It's really cool you can type in characters without knowing the pronunciation yet, man this would be awesome for us learners, when we have to lookup unknown vocab seen in a book for example.

There must be a Japanese version? Japanese has the same number or maybe even less radicals if I'm not mistaken?

Ack, I just thought, on the downside, I'm guessing this works with the "official" and sometimes not so straightforward character decomposition that they have in dictionaries; where we have more logical and visual decomposition with Heisig's primitives. Still, should be fairly easy to get used to (once you know how the not-so-straightforward characters are indexed in the dictionary).

I don't know what you mean by a Japanese version. If you want to type kanji (for quick look ups) then you can clearly do it with wubi but if you want to type words and sentences with kana I think you're going to be in a pickle. I can't see how the wubi system could incorporate the kana. Maybe interpret each kana as a chinese character in itself.

I got a quick question about the Windows IME. I enabled that shortcut (ALT+shift) that changes from English -> Japanese and Japanese -> English, but is there way to have a shortcut to change the "Input Mode"? Or to somehow set the default mode to hiragana? Now when I switch, the default is "Direct Input"...

When you have changed from English -> Japanese use alt+`
The (`) key is the key under escape in the top left hand corner.

Zactacular Wrote:I got a quick question about the Windows IME. I enabled that shortcut (ALT+shift) that changes from English -> Japanese and Japanese -> English, but is there way to have a shortcut to change the "Input Mode"? Or to somehow set the default mode to hiragana? Now when I switch, the default is "Direct Input"...

Alt-Capslock and Ctrl-Capslock appear to switch into katakana and hiragana, respectively.

The only difference (I think) with the (`) key is it switches between direct input and whatever your setting was previously (half width hiragana for example).