Submitted via IRC for Sulla
On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.
But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.
His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.
Read more at The Atlantic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:34PM (23 children)
In what way is china rising ahead technologically?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:06PM (2 children)
By stealing intellectual property?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:17PM (1 child)
No such thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:46PM
Worked well for US and most other states back in the day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:24PM (6 children)
[...]中国的输入文本的方式 - 以软件为中介的方式 - 将赢得胜利, 说. 实际上，它已经赢了. 我们的手机现在有预测文本和自动完成功能. 它采取了移动的约束, 让西方人意识到简单的你是什么类型的键盘的限制. 但即便如此, 你也只能让美国人走得这么远。
(Score: 5, Funny) by isostatic on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:39PM (4 children)
The way Chinese enters text - in a software-mediated way - will win, say. In fact, it has already won. Our phone now has predictive text and auto-complete functionality. It takes a move Constraint, let Westerners realize the simple limitations of what type of keyboard you are. But even so, you can only let Americans go so far.
Thanks to predicitive text, one in five children will be getting a visit from satan this christmas.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:06PM
You made me spit covfefe on my tablet
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:15PM (2 children)
That's when being on the naughty list finally pays off.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)
Yeah, what good is a lump of coal if it isn't actually burning?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:59PM
also in hell they use predictif text to program assembler ... which nobody knows how it came into being.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:34AM
소프트웨어가 중재 한 방식으로 중국어가 텍스트를 입력하는 방식이 승리 할 것이라고합니다. 실제로, 그것은 이미 이겼다. 우리의 전화는 이제 예측 텍스트와 자동 완성 기능을 가지고 있습니다. 그것은 서양인에게 당신이 제한되어있는 키보드의 유형의 단순성을 실현하게하는 움직이는 제약을 필요로합니다. 그러나 그럼에도 불구하고, 당신은 지금까지 미국인들만 갈 수 있습니다.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:58PM
It is "raising ahead" in the same way as the blind who uses a stick "rises ahead" of the person with sight because the person with sight doesn't use a stick to explore the surroundings.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:28PM (11 children)
Ignoring this article's silly assertion about the superiority of predictive text input, I can take a stab at that.
They are graduating huge numbers of people from University annually (with heavy emphasis on STEM), dumping piles of money in basic science, have a strong modern manufacturing infrastructure, are building transportation infrastructure to empower their rural communities, and are building international supply chain and distribution infrastructure (without blowing people up).
They can build a nuclear power plant in 3 years instead of 30. They can build a high speed rail line from breaking ground to carrying passengers in under 5.
Take an honest dispassionate look at the economic outlook for China, the EU, and the US for the next thirty years and ask yourself which one is poised to grow the most.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:53PM (3 children)
We're lucky if we can do it in 30. 🙁
--
The gene pool is shallow. And polluted.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:33PM (2 children)
The difference in Capitalist Bureaucracy and Communist Bureaucracy. I find it hard to believe that we couldn't build a Nuclear Power Plant in 3 years. It's much more of a cultural/political issue in the USA. We don't just say, we're building a Nuclear Power Plant, then build it. Which is exactly what China does. You don't say, no, to the government in China. In the USA there's bunches of red tape, there's environmental lobbyists, and the ever changing political climate. Though, given how Solar and Wind are developing, I'm not sure I'm in favor of Nuclear Power Plants at all. The catastrophic failure mode for Solar / Wind is immensely less problematic than a Nuclear Power Plant.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:41PM
That's for old-tech (just the kind of shite you end up with when you have a 30-year get-it-done hill to climb.) There's all manner of better tech available now with a considerably reduced set of such concerns. A nuke also takes up far less real estate per watt, and isn't dependent upon the weather, so there's that.
However, I am also a huge fan of solar. I have an installation here. Two, actually — one portable one for my ham radio trailer, and one for the house. Here in northern Montana, we have oodles of sun.
All I really want is for the coal and oil generation to go away ASAP. The catastrophic results of that are already coming home to roost, and they are far worse than those posed by nukes.
--
The only thing flat-earthers have to fear is sphere itself.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:23PM
Not In My Backyard is one of the few things everyone in the U.S. can agree on
Not even limited to nuke stations, but wind turbines, hell even electrical lines...because "electricity causes cancer" or some other moronic reason.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:20PM (4 children)
Erm...a nuclear power station is pretty much the only facility that I would *want* people to take their time building, to make sure they get everything right. Because the failure case is so bad if they don't.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:42PM (3 children)
Think through the implications of that statement. The newest nuclear power plant in my state (Watts Barr) started construction in 1973 and finished construction in 1996 and 2015 (Reactor 1 and 2 respectively). The original designers literally retired and died before the project finished. The oldest components in the system had 40 years of entropy and aging on them before they ever generated a single watt. That's a very long time for something to decay, become obsolete, or lose the institutional knowledge required to operate safely. It's poisoned the entire field as a career dead end, and almost half of the qualified engineers will retire in the next decade.
It's a problem.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:14PM (1 child)
Okay, maybe 30 years is too long, but I'm not sure the answer is exactly 3 years. There are these numbers between 3 and 30
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:01AM
It's not really a question of time; It's a question of quality. ElizabethGreene's comment about the original designers retiring and dying before the nuke plant came online is a comment about quality. You can't fix an exact number to a construction project with that kind of complication. Even well managed projects are merely estimates in the beginning with lots of problem solving and adjustments in the schedule along the way.
There are those who can better articulated the absurd reasons it takes so long to bring an American nuke plant online. It is very disheartening to read. I'm too lazy to post links, though. You'll have to Google-Bing-DuckDuck yourself.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:03PM
See? That's one additional danger of nuke power (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:31PM
I would like to nuance some of these things. Not that I think what you wrote is not true mind you. Just because I think that it depends on how we look at it. I'm not sure any of this is really related to the OP.
China is on the fastest course to having major issues of a scale that is incomparable than what we see in the western world. I'll just take healthcare. Traditionally the Chinese have had a balanced diet made of healthy foods. Now, between the pollution, the proliferation of junk food (both Western and Eastern), we see that this population is going to get worse problems with diabetes and other chronic illnesses much faster than their western counterparts. There is a reason why rich Chinese leave China. It's an incredibly busy place where urban landscapes change radically in weeks/months. But the long term costs are going to be, and are already, huge. Any Chinese I know who lives there tells me it takes them 45 minutes to make a meal because 30 minutes are spent just washing the food.
The Chinese government also likes to go fast. It works well in some cases, but in many others, it leaves unsustainable infrastructure that is not maintained and cannot be fixed. Just look at the nice tall high rises they build. Maybe the structure is sound, but the finishings are often of very poor quality. It's done fast and not well, it won't last. That does not mean that the western countries know how to do it better. It's just that when the government says go, you go even if you think it's a stupid idea. Because otherwise bad things happen to you. The Transit Elevated Bus is a recent example of that but there are many others. Again, not that don't have that problem in the West.
As for STEM graduates, there is an incredible number indeed. But these are highly specialized, number-crunching people who are very good at the one thing they were trained for. Critical thinking, autonomy etc. not so much. I generalize of course but it's a trend I have observed and discussed with colleagues over the past few years.
20 years ago, I would have absolutely loved to visit and possibly live in China. Now, not happening.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:07PM
So could anyone if they had a blatant disregard for people or safety.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:42PM (14 children)
we westerners have had chorded/composed characters on our computers literally forever, the chinese system simply accesses a larger tree of potential leaf nodes.
the only thing he's right is that you need more assistance navigating a bigger tree. that doesn't make a bigger tree better. (anyone used discourse forum software for entering emojis recently - more definitely isn't better.)
(yup, i can't be arsed to chord a capital letter presently)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:31PM
How would the little guy say that? Shit full of, is he?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:57PM (3 children)
中文不是易打字
The times you have to scroll through a page of characters before you get to the right "yi" is really fucking annoying in practice.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)
I was planning on starting a MPhil on this very subject matter (well, HCI from an Information-Theoretic perspective) nearly 30 years ago, before any of these particular instantiations of the problem even existed. I wish I had, I'm sure I'd have a wonderful citation count by now the number of terrible data entry interfaces that have been spewed into existence in the time in between.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:17AM
In the previous version of the chat software we used to use it would suggest emoji from text.
That was lost in an upgrade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:25PM
"yi"
There you go.
What's yer problem?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:06PM (7 children)
As someone who has more than a passing familiarity with both modern and traditional Chinese character reading and writing, lemme tell you, the Chinese character tree is a freaking mess.
The number of drag-along meanings that are highly obscure, indirect, and/or downright lost-in-time in even the small subset that your average Chinese has to wrap their head around is astonishing. Most Chinese don't know the 50k or so characters that comprise the set in a good Chinese dictionary, only a fraction of those; and as a result, most of the predictive software they use tends to devolve their writings into mediocrity (even if a prediction is right, they don't actually know what it means, so they choose a different one.)
They decided to abandon the traditional character group for a "simplified" one, mainly to reduce stroke count when hand-writing the characters. Hand-writing is now fading into obscurity (and not just in Chinese) and it is looking more and more like that was a bad decision WRT keeping the culturally relative links that tie to the older set. If they aren't — and it really appears that they aren't — they'd be much better off if they could revamp the whole thing with new characters that are considerably more direct. But that's hard because retraining everyone? Oy.
--
I am a mature adult. I am a... I...
I'm making a blanket fort.
You need a password to enter.
The password is "monkeybutt."
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:03PM (2 children)
From all I've learnt about written, spoken, and typed Chinese, it seems to have no properties that make it even vaguely desirable for use in any of those media (it's terrible on a noisy line, for example). However, at least the photos of old Chinese typewriters were good for a belly laugh. Some keys are good, therefore more keys are better, eh?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:09PM
If not for the Google search, I never would have thought a Chinese typewriter is an actual thing.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hwertz on Friday August 02 2019, @06:16AM
Korean has a fairly small set of consonant and vowel characters (and a few accent marks, there's 24-40 depending on how they are counted); they are combined usually 2 or 3 characters into a single symbol (usually by just stacking the symbols on top of each other), with each symbol representing one syllable.
I don't know if the Korean keyboard is more efficient or not; probably, I doubt English for example can average 3 characters per syllable. In terms of reading back a text, it definitely won't average 1 symbol per syllable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
I made an attempt to learn Chinese many years ago.
It reminded me of the Star Trek episode, Darmok and Jilad (spelling may be incorrect.)
It felt like Chinese was a language of metaphors. Without a lifetime of cultural background and symbolism, true meanings are hopelessly lost.
The specificity of western languages seem like a huge advantage over the suggestiveness of Chinese when it comes to engineering and science. And the opposite when it comes to poetry and literature. But then, I know nothing of Chinese literature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @07:18PM
How did you set your expectations? Is that why Chinese never set well with you? The set of characters is too large, or the meaning you set on was too often in the wrong set?
"The word with the most meanings in English is the verb 'set', with 430 senses listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters."
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:39PM
I have a very basic working knowledge of Chinese and agree with all of your points and some others made earlier by FatPhil.
Speaking of trees, ever tried to look up a character in a print edition of a Chinese dictionary? Major sorting issue.
Also, to my aged Western ear, many Chinese consonants like Pinyin s, sh and x can be difficult to distinguish if you are thinking about using spoken Chinese for data entry, plus you have tones, and generally more contextual dependency. On the other hand, with enough processing power for ML based language processing maybe those things aren’t a big deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:30PM
Monkeybutt!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:01PM
Look at the wander :) the auto-correcting brings.
I bet computers ruined written Chinese even worse than English.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:49PM
What's your WPM count then, Tom?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:50PM (5 children)
The differences, advantages or disadvantages between the character sets, will flatten out over time as computers get more powerful and user interfaces inch along one good idea at a time. It isn't going to matter in the long run who has the larger alphabet.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:27PM (4 children)
Well, you're right, but only because in the long run we'll all be using a technologically enhanced version of a throat mike. Learning touch typing is a pain even in English (and we don't use the diacritical marks that most other European languages use).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:41PM (3 children)
I can think and type, faster than I can speak.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:42PM (2 children)
You can type faster than 150 WPM (average) or 200 (slow auctioneer)?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:02PM (1 child)
I would like to see a speech-to-text software that could even come close to correctly recognizing auctioneer speech. Perhaps, speech to text input will eventually take over. I could definitely see it taking over as far as tablets/smartphones are concerned. When writing text that needs to be edited, updated, etc. It seems like it would be quite difficult to do with speech to text software.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:14PM
From your initial statement and follow-up clarification after being questioned on it, I infer that what you actually meant was, "I can think and type, faster than I can speak and have today's computer understand me."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jbruchon on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:54PM (6 children)
Predictive keyboards are great for mobile devices because they have garbage keyboards (as in touchscreen-only) and long abandoned hardware keyboards. What I can bang out in SwiftKey today is slower than what I could bang out with my HTC Dream and its 5-row physical keyboard. The entire problem with predictive input methods is that they don't behave reliably between instances. If I use a Japanese IME and select a word, it moves up in the prediction order. That means I can't always rely on the list being in a constant order and I have to pay attention to the list, particularly on a different computer. That's not faster, that's slower. Speed is not obtained by exploiting computer power to aid input, it's obtained by being able to "muscle memorize" everything and belt it out without stopping and thinking about it.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:40PM (3 children)
Part of what happened is that someone invented and patented a one-handed input method that uses the space bar as a modifier to flip the keyboard horizontally. For example, while Space is held, keys QWER produce POIU. Then the inventor's company Matias tried selling half keyboards for PDAs and early smartphones, only to find that companies were instead buying them to accommodate employees with disabilities. So instead, Matias marked its half keyboard up to $600 each and introduced a full-sized "508 keyboard" named after section 508 of the (U.S.) Rehabilitation Act 1973. This move sounds to me like a scheme to open the deeper pockets of employers and health insurers, though I'm interested to read arguments otherwise. In any case, the exorbitant charge for this input method is one thing keeping physical keyboards for handheld devices from being practical.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:32PM
There was a chorded key system available in the 1970's. It never became popular because learning to use it was too much of a drag. This will be true of other attempts in the same direction. There's got to be a really good reason before people will be willing to invest a lot of time and effort in learning a new way of doing things, even if it *would* be better. Just consider all the trouble the Dvorak keyboard hypers have had, and that doesn't require even any new hardware, and is clearly better, once you've invested the time and effort into learning it (which I haven't).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:33PM (1 child)
Dang never heard of the patented one, but saw this recently: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard-layout-for-the-lazy/ [xkcd.com] which largely does the same thing but on regular keyboards for people who can't be arsed to move their hand off the mouse.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday August 04 2019, @01:39PM
I'm surprised that mirrorboard.xkb was never the subject of a notice of claimed infringement by Matias. I remember reading about Matias sending takedowns to authors of other utilities that implement the same functionality on a PC.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:36PM (1 child)
Agreed. Nothing annoys me more than people who try to have long extended discussions with me via SMS texts. Texting is convenient and fine for a quick question about what time to meet up or something, but I hate "typing" on a mobile device. If I'm doing more than 3 back-and-forth texting exchanges about something, I often just say, "I'll email you." It's faster for me to switch to a computer and pull up email than it is to waste time "typing" on a mobile device. (And yes, I've tried a number of different input methods.)
This is potentially a disadvantage, but not necessarily if learning algorithms can figure out your style and make increasingly better predictions for you over time. Yes, there needs to be a portable method that allows you to transfer this predictive pattern to another device if you want. And perhaps a setting that says "freeze options" so that the algorithm stops "training" and just always gives you the same options from the same input from that point forward. If you have that, I don't know that this objection is very serious, as your input method will improve as you work with the interface, not unlike how humans have had their "pet tools" for centuries -- a person can cut better and faster with "my knife" than with other people's, etc. Often tools and machines would be customized by their owners to work better for them. Why is this any different?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jbruchon on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:15PM
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about predictive input; it can be much faster than non-predictive input, but it becomes a double-edged sword, especially once you need to type anything differently than usual. For example, if I use my laptop to constantly type out blog posts about my snotty, ill-informed opinions on the internet (which I gleefully do, I assure you) but then I eventually need to write a formal grant proposal or a research paper for a university course, I'm going to use a very different style and way of wording things than what the predictions are now strongly weighted towards. There's a good chance that my favorite expletives and insults will be predicted inappropriately on a regular basis and I'll be forced to work around them in the prediction lists. This could end up actually slowing me down.
Of course, one of the constant problems with predictive input methods is that they not only may predict differently than expected and jolt you into stopping and being forced to concentrate on massaging the predictive inputs more cautiously, they'll also sometimes get all of the predictions wrong. At that point, you'll be forced to type most or all of the word(s) out anyway. In my experience, predictive keyboards are never ever faster than what a reasonably fast typist can produce.
The problem with Asian languages (particularly Chinese and Japanese) is that there are so many possible characters in the total character set that there's no practical way to have a keyboard with all of the possible characters. Languages with literally thousands of glyphs are wonderful for visual compactness, but they're absolute garbage once you aren't physically writing the characters out. They are hard to read at smaller sizes because they rely so heavily on fine detail to convey several shapes in one "box", they can't be typed in a practical way because there are just way too many glyphs to lay out, and they require 16+ bits per glyph to represent in a computer. It's faster to type kanji out as hiragana and then use a prediction engine to convert it, yes, but that's not because it's BETTER, it's because the only other ways possible to do it are very impractical. One of the beautiful things about the English language is that it centers around a fairly minimal set of easy-to-discriminate glyphs and the average English word length in common usage is roughly 5 characters. English is easy to type, fits on a hardware keyboard, and doesn't really need predictive techniques to speed up its input when the input device isn't trash (like a touchscreen.)
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:03PM (8 children)
So the Chinese method is better because it uses more processing power and the standard takes more memory to implement?
I have no idea what the train of thoughts is here.
Anyway predictive text has"won" if you truly believe phones and tablets will one day completely replace computers. And it may not be the norm but a lot of people turn it off because it interferes with their personal use of language.
And let's not forget all the other flaws ideograms have compared to alphabets: font design, font scaling and not to forget: they rely on a phonetic system to be typed anyway.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 4, Informative) by doke on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:11PM (2 children)
I had to turn off predictive text on my phone because it gets almost every technical word or acronym wrong. It would often change them to something absurd, and I had to spend three times as long proofreading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:45PM
Same, I turned it off and was much less annoyed all the time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:01PM
Predictive text is also thoroughly useless if you're bilingual, and expect to be able to type in a minority language.
I've been ignoring predictive text since the days of T9 dictionaries...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:18PM (3 children)
How does one memorize the hundreds of characters and their meanings?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:11PM
Flashcards, spaced repetitions training and patience.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:09PM (1 child)
FTFY
--
Have an urge to follow the masses? Careful:
Sometimes, the "m" is silent.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:37PM
Learning the thousands of characters needed to write correctly in Chinese won't be that much different from learning the thousands of lexical rules needed to write correctly in English.
(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:44PM
Oh... Chinese method of input. Sorry, when I started reading your post, I spaced out and thought you were talking about new Microsoft Windows versions over the past 25 years. :)
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:15PM (3 children)
The non-advantage of having to rely on software to guess what you meant to type has already been addressed. But there is one potential use case for Chinese characters that hasn't been explored much outside Asia. That is for the product and UI designers who insist on labeling everything with cryptic little pictures instead of words. Instead of a button with a black circle with a dot inside it, maybe we could have a 幅 button, which at least some portion of the world's population would be able to infer the meaning of, and the rest might be able to learn a thing which then transfers to another context.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:52PM (2 children)
The makers of a comic decided to use arabic for some text quite possibly to make it look otherworldly or some crap.
How does one find out what these characters mean? If they mean anything.
I copied that one: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=幅 [duckduckgo.com]
but, hey, that doesn't help.
Is it "breadth range width"?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:37PM (1 child)
That, or whatever a black circle with a dot in it means.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @09:14AM
Okay so that is a sai to the left of a table with a pot with a lid.
So let's translate
Sai = killing or penetration or death
Table = storage or bench space or furniture
Pot = food or meal or water
Lid = covering or disk to throw
So this symbol 幅 means "killing food on your table" meaning "home cooked meal"
I can so Do This!
Next! Let's do another one!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:18PM
"China is rising ahead technologically". If they are, it has nothing to do with their keyboards, you cheese dick; you brains of spilt fuck. If China is "rising ahead technologically", it is simply because there is a veritable river of money flowing into China from all corners of the earth because they have created a monopoly of manufacturing built on slave labor and a complete disregard for rule of law.
Yes, the software-mediated way of keyboarding is how things are done these days. The fact that the Chinese have to do this to write anything does not give them some sort of technological advantage.
Really, far too many Atlantic articles are founded on asinine assumptions which make great click-bait, but are devoid of any real analysis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:43PM (5 children)
Constructed from Latin alphabet glyphs instead of "basic strokes". Nothing more, nothing less. One can be just as remotely related to actual pronunciation as the other.
If anything, the Chinese are having it worse as with any given phonetic-based input method, their own native dialect can pronounce a given glyph as something utterly different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Categories [wikipedia.org]
The resulting proliferation of various competing input methods is all well and good until you consider a little thing called "someone else's device". What use is your proficiency with your pet input method, when with a public terminal or somesuch you flop around like an Englishman presented with a Cyrillic keyboard?
TFA is a man running his mouth to display his inability of abstract thought to the world at large.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
It is a security risk to use someone else's keyboard, as someone else's keyboard could be logging the keystrokes that make up a user's password. For this reason, a paranoid person is more likely to carry a private terminal, such as a laptop or smartphone, and use it to establish an encrypted channel (such as SSH or TLS) over a public network. Then all the man in the middle can see are the server's hostname and its certificate, not the contents of the communication, and not even that if a VPN is used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:59PM
which you either "trust", or go away with connection refused.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:15PM (2 children)
No. There is a very significant difference: One is a structured system directly linked to pronunciation of the actual language, the other is pictures with no direct link to how the symbol is to be spoken. They aren't learned the same way, they aren't used the same way, and they are incredibly different in terms of how difficult they are to master, or even use to guide a lookup in a dictionary.
--
Polygamy: The plural of spouse is spice.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:41PM
That's a point, but not a strong one, as over time divergence in the ways various letter combinations are to be pronounced has increased, and kept increasing. Consider the differences between the closely related languages of English and German (or even English and English). Over time, unless there is some strong counter pressure (such as nationwide radio) the divergences will keep increasing. And if there *is* such a strong counter pressure, the divergences will decrease. It could be that the Peking (Beijing) dialect will become the standard pronunciation throughout China, and then there *will* be a link between the ideograph and how it's pronounced.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:27PM
First, dearest creature in Creation, study English pronunciation: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos [wikisource.org]
And afterwards, avail yourself of this bit of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%29#Phonetic_components [wikipedia.org]
Cheers!
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:45PM
Is typing speed really that important? If it is, then use someone who can use a stenotype to record faster than speech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:32PM (2 children)
TFA is basically "you can do better than QWERTY" and "computers are fast so predictive text should be enabled everywhere".
The bit where inputting Chinese is relevant is entirely due to the large character set ensuring that there wasn't any long-standing historical standard regarding text input among Chinese speakers, so more recently designed styles of input were more likely to succeed.
Now, QWERTY isn't ideal, but it is familiar, and the (alleged) speed-ups of an alternate layout aren't worth the retraining effort for many people in the US, which is what the article contrasts against.
I will agree that some kind of predictive text or tab-autocompletion probably should be standard though -- when I'm using Notepad++, I have autocomplete enabled even when editing plain text and not just programming. It's just really convenient.
On mobile, you can type like three letters and standard predictive text systems will bring up what you wanted to say.
There's also an argument to be made against predictive text in that it leads you into its own writing style, which would shape what you're trying to convey, but I'm not going there right now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:48PM
https://www.freemake.com/blog/12-funny-autocorrect-mistakes/ [freemake.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:46PM
Personally I hate autocorrect for all purposes I've encountered it in. I turn it off in my programming editor because it's guesses are usually incorrect until I've typed nearly the entire word. I do use it on my phone, partially because I don't know how to turn it off, and partially because the keyboard is so small that whenever I try to hit a key, my odds of the correct key being selected are about 1 in 3...and sometimes it's one of the three keys that the device decided I hit. But with something longer, like a predicted word, my chances of hitting the correct word are significantly better...*IF* the correct word is one of the presented options.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:52PM
It seems to be saying their entry is more efficient because Chinese users are more likely to experiment with different entry software (largely for historical reasons), not because of some inherent advantage of Chinese characters. I didn't see any clear argument for inherent advantage in terms of speed.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:15PM (6 children)
🀄️⌨️🙂 - 🌁⌨️😟
(Spoiler: Its a string of Emojis)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:59PM (4 children)
After looking up the emojis, why the fuck do they call 中 "red dragon"? What? That's not what 中 means.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:28PM (3 children)
It's what we call that mahjong tile.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:53PM (2 children)
But why?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:54PM (1 child)
There are three types of tiles called "dragons" in mahjong: red, green and white. Different sets use different markings but typically tiles are marked with 中 (in red) for the red dragon tiles, 發 (in green) for the green dragon tiles, and a blue rectangle or no marking (blank tile) for the white dragon tiles.
The symbols used apparently represent different Confucian virtues. I have no idea about the origin of calling these tiles "dragons" is, though.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:00PM
Some details on the mahjong tiles [thoughtco.com]:
Although despite what this article says, I don't think the blue 白 marking is very commonly used on actual mahjong sets.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:08AM
TGDNR
(Too Graphical, Did Not Read)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:39PM (1 child)
Yet another input method patent. Meanwhile, every single Chinese I ever met used Pinyin on both mobiles and desktops. Each and every single one.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:19PM
My Chinese friends and I all use Chinese characters driven by pinyin input methods. Simplified, sad to say, rather than classic, but still.
--
Distance Raptor
——————————————— = Velociraptor
Time Raptor
(Score: 3, Informative) by hwertz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:45PM
This is nonsense. I don't have some autofilll thing on the desktop because I don't want one, I can type 120 words per minute and don't need it trying to guess what I'm typing. On the phone, I do have it suggesting words, but I have a Blackberry so I don't need it; the guesses tend to be more a nuisance than helpful, but (contradicting the author) it IS THERE. In Ubuntu, the command prompt has tab autocomplete; apps do underline mispelled words (like "mispelled") so I'm getting typing aids even in this very browser. I have all kinds of helpful tools in IDEs (integrated development environments) like Android Studio.
To repeat my premise, westerners don't have this stuff the chinese have because WE DON'T NEED IT. The letters are there on the keyboard. It's not some sign of China surpassing the US technologically (not going into who is higher tech, just saying keyboard input has nothing to do with it.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:15PM (2 children)
So how much did they get paid for this article?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:20PM (1 child)
I bet The Atlantic do it for free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:54PM
So did your mother back in the day
Hi Son!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PhilSalkie on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:34PM
The advantage of phonetic character-based writing is that you can read and understand a word which you have never before seen written down. (And don't let's get started with "English isn't phonetic" - the roughly 20% of words which aren't are mostly the shorter, common words. The words you haven't seen written down before are almost certainly phonetically spelled.)
This is an overwhelming advantage to ease of learning - if you watch a video on shark reproduction where they use the word "ovoviviparity", and you then read an article about it, you'll almost certainly recognize the written word _without ever having seen it written before._
(Of course, our modern GUIs are throwing this advantage away because nobody wants to bother setting up translations - so we have symbols like floppy disks for use by people who don't even know there ever _was_ such a thing - but that's another battle.)
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:13PM (2 children)
requires great peace of mind!
In 10 years of using predictive text, I have never once known it get it right.
It may work for teenage girls with limited vocabularies (ie those who find Emojis useful)
but real men use Fortran.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:40PM (1 child)
No. Real Men use butterflies [xkcd.com].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:22PM
Of course, there's an emacs command to do just that.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
with the rate Apple is releasing emoji https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-offers-a-look-at-new-emoji-coming-to-iphone-this-fall/ [apple.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @09:28AM
One day they will switch from Chinese to emoji.
It is one of the Signs of the End of Times.