Slightly overstating your case with that example, aren't you?
I'd have it more like this:
Where are you going now? I'm going out for a drink.
どこに行きますか。読みに行きます。
Where you going? Out for a drink..
どこに行く？ 飲みに行く。
Japanese is briefer, I'll give you that, but informal
language is briefer in different ways for the two
languages.
Now take into account that the English is legible in a
5x7 font (barely), but the Japanese becomes a total
blur at that size, for all but the simplest kanji.
This is an old argument, of course. It's not how many
characters, but how many pixels, at a given level
of legibility.
-michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Curt Sampson" <cjs@cynic.net>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 6:49 PM
Subject: (keitai-l) Advantages of Kanji for Keitai Communication
> 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 16:20:39 2001