On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Nik Frengle wrote:
> I still prefer line breaks that are not in the middle of a word. But I know
> what you mean--I do most of my i-mode browsing in Japanese, and it is
> amazing how much more information you can get in one screen of Japanese (and
> Chinese by extension) than you can in English. In a way it is
> counter-intuitive--there are only about 8 kanji per line, so you should be
> able to get alot more English. But not.
It shouldn't be counter-intuitive at all. Consider that a typical kanji
"word" is two kanji, or four narrow character slots. The majority of
English nouns are more than three letters long (leaving one narrow
character slot for the space).
> This is a whole different thread, but I would reckon that the Japanese
> language actually has some advantages in this regard, for use on a small
> mobile phone screen--it is a much more compact form of communication,
> fitting a lot more meaning into a much smaller space.
> Any thoughts?
In general, I'd agree. Besides the kanji issue, there's also the
lack of spaces and the ability to wrap the line anywhere. The lack of
articles and noun inflections also helps. Another big help is probably
the ability to leave out obvious parts of the sentence even when being
prefectly grammatical:
Where are you going now? I'm going out for a drink.
どこに行く？ 飲みに行く。
(At least I hope that's perfectly grammatical--my Japanese is pretty bad.)
Of course it gets even shorter when you don't mind getting a bit more
casual with your use of language.
The only real disadvantage in display is katakana, since those words
can get quite long. Though that can be somewhat mitigated by using
half-width katakana.
I also find input somewhat faster using hiragana than I do using romaji,
though part of that is likely due to my phone making me scroll through
upper case before lower for every character I input. (It really should
use the Palm algorithm of defaulting to upper case only at the beginning
of sentences and such likely places.)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
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Received on Wed Sep 26 12:38:23 2001