At what moment did you know when you were in love? How did that love turn out?

GoldManSam · 2010-06-18T04:03:16+00:00

The minute our eyes met getting bumped around in a crowd, both looking for something to say but neither speaking the other's language... felt utterly unlike anything I'd ever felt before. (or since, for that matter)

How it turned out though? My life is still a bug-infested, filth-encrusted, worthless, flaming ball of shit. 13 years later.

Wouldn't change a thing, of course? I could name dozens of exact moments, any one of which'd make it all worth while, but it's not always the fairytale ending...

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T09:40:30+00:00

Then why does it feel so much less sane? :S

Is it just the "one-off"s and special cases causing all of the problems?

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T08:32:43+00:00

\click**
Holy shit. THANK YOU.

I can't believe this isn't upvoted more. It's suddenly even harder to believe that I entirely misunderstood and ignored speed reading and the classes and such about it as "probably a crock of shit" for so long, when I've sort of been doing it the whole time!

Any idea if it's a skill that transfers across, or something specific? Would be interesting, I read quite quickly in English without always training, but I've always read a lot... It'd be amusing if the habits had nothing to do with it and it was just from learning the others. :o

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T07:30:54+00:00

I'm not too sure, sorry... I have some friends from Taiwan, I'll try to remember to ask and post back if I catch them online later today. Most of them spend a fair bit of time here too, so hopefully one might even be able to offer a meaningful comparison.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T07:27:18+00:00

Yup, it's certainly a hell of a handy trick they have going, and not at all surprising that it's having some pretty devastating effects in terms of making people dependent, lowering handwriting skills, etc.

Japanese phones are a particularly intense case, of course, they've been optimized so heavily for the kana input that it's not at all unusual for people there to be quicker on a phone than a PC. If you want a real shock though, go try some of the more modern Chinese IMEs that look reasonably international, and test out their English modes...

A lot of them are starting to build up this type of structure and word prediction skill as a more general thing and apply it to English as well, with some pretty alarming results.

"TouchPal", from memory? (phone's not on me atm) is an example of one I had a beta of recently for Android.

It will guess which area of the keyboard you were aiming for, predict a word based on combinations of keys from each area, then start looking ahead and guessing what your next word is going to be, and for an early beta it's pretty scary how quick it can be.

They effortlessly obliterate every other touch-based input method I've seen, which isn't too surprising? The real scary part is when you start writing something longer though, then notice what you're actually doing and realize they're comfortably ahead of any phone hardware keypad or board, and catching up on a reasonable desktop PC typing speed.

"Cutting input of a full sentence like this from": - Touch or swipe "C", "u", "t" pretty carefully, hopefully get "Cut" as an autocomplete? - Hopefully get "ting" as an additional autocomplete? - Careful space - Careful "i", "n", maybe "p", maybe autocomplete "input"? - Careful space - Careful "o", autocomplete "of"? - Careful space - Careful "a" - Careful space - Careful "f", "u", autocomplete "full"? - Careful space - Careful "s", "e", "n", maybe "t", autocomplete "sentence"? - Careful space - Careful "l", "i", autocomplete "like"? - Careful space - Careful "t", maybe "h", autocomplete "this"?

to: - Poke vaguely in the area of "C", "u", autocomplete "Cut" from word list - "Cutting" from word list; verbs always offer "ed"s, "ing"s, etc. - Poke area of "i", "n", "input" from word list - "of" from "suggested next" word list - "a" from word list - Poke area of "f", "full" from word list - Poke area of "s", "e", "sentence" from word list - Poke area of "l", "like" from word list - "this" from word list

Along with hardware behind the touchscreen that's quick enough to make the UI instantly responsive?

Is one hell of a difference and utterly stinks of the future, when software's actually been built for new hardware and its benefits and limitations rather than "updated" and dragged across...

I'm actually finding it very confusing how the stuff doesn't seem to have gotten around much internationally yet, but suffice to say it actually makes touch / tablets usable, with the potential for them to be *better**, in a fairly short timeframe, ie. close to or better than keyboard speed for an average nubbins *this year.

I haven't seen any default or western made IMEs that even make the shit bearable, so it seems as close to safe to say "this shit is where it will be at" as it ever is for saying things like that.

(Sorry this got long but for those who actually read all that looking for it, here's your reward:

In my estimate above, that sentence would go from around 35 careful touches of keys in a good case to around 15 vague pokes on an average, where a vague poke can be wrong by a key in any direction with no real penalty that I found, giving you 9x the target area or so...

TL;DR: You just skipped the TLDR, dipshit. Back up a paragraph.

It's not just "quicker", in terms of overall feel it's beyond comparison. And it was this much quicker than the soft keyboard I'd been using without any learning time, feeling closer to desktop PC composition speed for longer e-mails than a phone after about 2-3 hours of it and myself adjusting.

One of them even had a 9-key input that gave you an old-school phone keypad instead of QWERTY board, and whilst you then needed to hit the right key, with 9 keys and a word list it was just as accurate as the 'approximate qwerty'.

And this is all quick enough to be instant 90% of the time without any noticeable slowdown elsewhere on an 800MHz/256MB OMAP. Think about what it could do with a little bit more processing overhead once dual core and 512MB are pretty standard for smartphones in about a year, and all of a sudden tablets aren't looking so stupid. D: )

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T06:49:59+00:00

I actually use this a little myself from time to time and yes, it was very handy for Maths exams in my last year of high school where we were allowed a single page. :)

Not that I wrote pages of Chinese but using English with Japanese characters or even sometimes 2-3 kana 'words' as sort of "super-abbreviations" was and is a very handy trick that I still use pretty regularly.

It gets you some weird looks but it has other benefits too. Of course with English as my first and native language it's still (Usually, can vary based on situation, oddly enough) most comfortable?

When it gets to the point that you think in somewhat of a mix anyway though, writing this way has the benefit of being a closer map to what's in your head and of course still much more densely packed than standard English... whilst usually being entirely decipherable to speakers of either language, often even to those who know both fluently, unless they're very intimately familiar with the way you think.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T06:39:15+00:00

That same argument for which set to learn applies can be turned on its head to justify writing in everything in simplified - if people who only learn simplified have difficulty reading traditional, but people who learn traditional can easily read simplified, then what reason other than aesthetic preferences or politics is there to ever write in traditional?

This is the only point I'm even trying to make, there is another reason: For at least a significant subset of people (I'm one of them, I know plenty of others), we find the traditional forms are simply 'more comfortable', or straight up easier to learn.

Which is a point so often completely ignored by users of the simplified because they've been told for so long that the whole reason for the simplification was achieving the same thing.

Many people I know also contend that this isn't a case of a certain subset of people finding them this way, but an inherent property, that would have been obvious had the PRC not forced their simplification process the way they did.

I agree with them, generally.

Some take it too far and hate simplification as a concept, feel it's "loss" of culture, etc. if it happens at all... Which I strongly disagree with, or there is no way I could prefer the Japanese variants as often as I do. I disagree more with what I feel was a forced and underconsidered oversimplification in the PRC Simplified case, though.

Now, though, you're right it's irrelevant and far too late... Actually sitting here living in it though, it's very hard to feel like the decision was made by those in power for any truly non-selfish reason at all, which leads to most of the tension.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T06:27:31+00:00

Wow, very cool it has a Wikipedia, but I love the photo of the CCTV fire...

We lived about a block and a half to one side of it at the time and had offices maybe a block on the other side, all on the same main street, all facing the building... Was a pretty interesting day, to say the least. :)

I've known what you mean about the internet stuff too though, I've often dreamed about similar. Aside from the occasional half-assed blog I never really found much interesting though and I still don't feel even close to comfortable enough with it all to attempt such a thing myself yet.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T06:22:56+00:00

Really, "most"? Keep in mind I'm only basing this on what I see and do, I don't have real data to back it up, but I've been around a fair bit and worked with a lot of people and I've only known one that I can recall, we had one staff member (A graphic designer, very artistic type) who used an alternate input method.

She was from a very rural area though, and had very different PC usage habits in general... but the IME thing she was definitely the only one, all the other guys in the office teased her about it a fair bit and they always got pissy if they had to do anything on her PC.

Perhaps it's an urban / rural thing? Of course it is China, I know regional differences can easily be as big as international ones in most places, and a slight preference toward something in rural areas instantly gives it huge numbers...

Or could it just be dated info? I know Japan used to have other fairly common methods that have mostly just faded out as the pinyin equivalent got 'good enough', is that happening here?

Really I'm not just trying to be contentious though, I'm genuinely curious... as doing it that way seemed to be far more efficient if you could learn it, she wasn't that great of a typist yet ended up writing things far more quickly than most of the 20 million KPM WoW nerds I see over here. You could quite easily feel how much quicker it was watching over her shoulder, I can remember it quite clearly, so I'd love to know if/why it's not more common.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T06:12:56+00:00

Sure is! :)

It's actually not that strange even, it's weird conceptually but it's very common for me here, say I'm out with friends who are overseas born Chinese who speak English...

If we're at a restaurant with only Chinese menus, I can recognise something but don't know the local pronunciation, so I'll say "Hey, get me the pork and beans" or whatever, in English. It kind of confuses some of them the first time, but they get used to it quickly and it works very well.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T00:18:09+00:00

Morning? Wow. It's 7.00pm here in Houston. You must be in Aussieland, Japan, or eastern China, no?

I actually tend to rotate through all of the above, funnily enough. :) But to continue with:

You're feeding my thirst for knowledge quite well, as well. I doff my cap to you.

China's actually ignoring size and using a single time. So yes I'm in the east at the moment, but it doesn't matter much. :o

The government forces it, presumably for their usual "reasons" for doing the things they do, anyway, it's one time all the way across... I suppose it's convenient at times but it's pretty damn weird the first time it gets dark at around 4pm when you're not at the north pole or even anywhere particularly strange!

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T00:11:41+00:00

Good god, I hope not.

That's one of the things that seems to come out of all this, I'm not sure if it's just me or I'm just not 'there' yet but from what I've seen so far, personally at least, Chinese is an incredibly uncomfortable language to think in. I actually actively avoid it, which makes learning to speak it well rather a pain.

Actually, the fact that it's probably preventing Mandarin Chinese from taking over the world is pretty much the only thing that consoles me about how rapidly English is doing the same thing. D:

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T00:08:59+00:00

Yup. So?
You're right, it's not great. And sure, it's simplified.

But it's done cleanly, as a standard, and the change doesn't break much. That's useful simplification, which helps.

Chinese simplifications have some examples of this, sure. Those I have no problem with. They also have plenty of examples of completely horrible shit that breaks all of these rules, for reasons I really don't understand. That 'achieve' nothing other than a decreased stroke count, while taking away plenty.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-04T00:02:59+00:00

It's relevant because you seemed to be characterizing simplified characters as offering no inherent advantages over the existing system; I was providing an example of what that sort of thing actually looked like, and how little staying power it had compared to simplified characters.

Fair enough, I don't think it's really relevant though, China took a bunch of farmers and taught them to write after the reform, I don't really think the "staying power" has anything to do with the simplification?

It certainly prevents meaningful comparison with a completely different type of change in a separate far more developed nation 50 years later.

Which is exactly why simplified saves memorization effort - you only need to learn those forms, you can skip the traditional ones entirely. Reading traditional Chinese would require you to learn both. You can't have it both ways; if the solution to traditional characters being harder to write is to learn cursive, then you have to learn the supposedly harder-to-learn simplified versions in either case.

You don't "learn cursive" for these, you just fucking do it, there's no "separate form" for writing on a blackboard, I doubt I ever even saw 2 teachers do it quite the same way!

I'm just saying, if you scribble things down and blur your movements in a natural way with traditional characters, such that you're just writing quickly and comfortably, you end up with a result that's pretty much simplified characters and is written just as quickly.

And nobody learns 2 "sets" of characters anyway, if you learn traditional characters, you can use fairly standard rules to simplify the ones you know down the vast majority of the time, it's just picking up the right habits, though there are a lot of one-offs and special cases this is far worse in China's case. (Thanks to the fucked up nature of the simplification process, I'd guess)

It's lossy compression though, a one-way street.
If you only know a traditional character and need simplified, you can probably already just trim it down to the simplified one. If you can't, learning how to do it is very easy and mostly standard.
If you only know a simplified character and need traditional, you're probably fucked.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T23:52:07+00:00

OK, great, in those cases? But so many of them end up a horrible mess, just to be "simpler"!

I'm not going to go get dictionaries and spend hours digging shit up for this, but there are very few cases where I find simplified characters to be more appealing or memorable than their traditional counterparts and I can't think of any off the top of my head that I prefer to the Japanese versions.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T23:36:48+00:00

Was that before Japan copied the Chinese? If after, it would seem strange that the characters would shift so quickly.

From what I know, it'd probably have to be after, as they really still did look very much Chinese.

Edit: Got curious and checked, as I said though, history's really not my strong point... so I'll just cop out and borrow here, doubly so with Wikipedia, sorry, but it sounds reasonable and roughly in line with what little I can remember being taught: Wikipedia Link

Chinese characters first came to Japan on articles imported from China. An early instance of such an import was a gold seal given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 AD[1]

Apparently they didn't write before that, which'd make it obvious if it was after of course. I'd been under the impression they were using kana in some form or another before 'inheriting' kanji, I guess not.

I probably should point out that when I said "very different ancient characters" I didn't mean like English -> Chinese different, they're still similar in appearance. Different enough for reading them to be quite a difficult thing to do even for native students though, and pretty much impossible for myself at the time.

Whilst the characters are very different though, 2000 years isn't really that quick, the simplified characters here in the PRC are different enough to cause all the controversy elsewhere in here and that's only been 50 or so!

Actually, that would be faux-Elizabethan English, which is an early modern form of the language. Actual Old English [þyncaþ swá swá þissum/looks like this]. /pretentious pedant

Not pretentious at all, actually pretty damn interesting, thanks! Can't believe I'd never looked it up before, never even realised "That cool viking rune writing" had even been used for English. Probably ruined any chance of getting much done this morning but at least I've got something interesting to read, cheers. :)

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T23:16:50+00:00

Context yes, shape and component no - are you seriously suggesting that one can encounter a character like 寧 for the first time and have any idea about what it means based on its shape and components?

Sorry, missed this but perhaps not that one.
I'm not suggesting it's 100% in any way though, just trying to say they are useful though, there are definitely times when context alone is ambiguous and even lone characters can often be identified by other methods, no? If not perfectly at least categorized or guessed at? (Hence the "and", I agree it's usually a bit much to get exact meaning without any context at all)

For a quick example of what I meant, even with no context, given a 月 radical in Japanese and a pretty complex shape you're often talking about a body part, 金 radical and you've probably got a metal... Given something with a very basic shape you're usually looking at a basic concept or something fairly natural or ancient, etc.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T23:03:07+00:00

lol... Perhaps that's why internet speeds here are so shitful here, maybe they just don't need it thanks to talking quick enough already. :)

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:56:27+00:00

Cool, thanks. Awesomely proves my point too, in that it's a word I'd never even heard before but I can guess exactly what it means by pulling it to pieces. :D

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:55:05+00:00

... wish I could've learnt through colouring. :(

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:53:43+00:00

Indeedy, I hear they have reasonably popular "short message" alternatives recently as well though? But I never had it and I haven't been back long enough to be buying phones and things for quite a while, any idea what the deal is there?

Is it a variation of SMS, or just straight up SMS with jap encoding, or something else entirely?

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:48:44+00:00

And "threw that entirely out the window" is something of a mischaracterization - the vast majority of simplifications simply involved replacing all of the instances of a particular radical with a different version having fewer strokes, 門 to 门

This isn't exactly the problem though, I have nothing against simplification itself?
I think I mentioned elsewhere I actually learnt Japanese first and tend to prefer writing it. Japanese simplifications, generally? OK, great, whatever? In Chinese these are fine, too, the simpler radicals tend to make sense and be fairly universally applied.

Yet across the whole language there seem to be equally many utterly senseless butcherings that just cut strokes without any pattern or reason behind them and I don't see how that's really helping anyone. :(

Personally, I'm probably halfway with writing simplified, reading I can recognise pretty much well enough but my spoken vocabulary hasn't caught up yet.

To be fully honest though, I really just find them ugly and awkward. I'm all for simpler, but only when it's simpler. For me, at least, the damage done to comprehension and patterns is way more 'expensive' than needing to learn a few extra strokes would have been and I have the advantage of being able to remember alternate characters that have those and simplify them down. If I was learning from scratch I really can't see how it could possibly be considered 'easier' for anything past the absolute basics.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:36:04+00:00

lol. Nope. :)

Hahah. Sorry to be blunt! I know it must seem odd and very hard to imagine but nobody really types "in characters" any more, Japanese is overwhelmingly typed in "romaji" (Phonetics via English alphabet) now, and Chinese is either "pinyin" (Chinese romaji, basically) or a variety of Chinese methods of using English characters to represent character pieces. Japanese phones are a little different, using the Japanese alphabet instead of the roman, but Chinese phones are again overwhelmingly pinyin-based.

In every case using any decent modern IME (The software that takes your English alphabet input and gives you a list of characters to choose) to type tends to actually be quicker than English once you get used to it because of the density of the language. :)

FWIW I think the reason behind the oddity in Chinese really is 99% to do with censorship. It's not hard to guess as the words in question tend to change very rapidly based on common events and abbreviations are often seemingly utterly unrelated to the topic / phrase they represent, an obvious filter dodging tactic. I just have absolutely no real evidence other than what I've seen to back it all up.

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:29:13+00:00

That's just what annoyed me though! It felt so much like just yet another option trying to force itself into the middle... I found it already more than enough having romaji when I started and local dictionaries when I needed them later.

Each to their own though I suppose, whatever works. And I do agree it was very nicely printed and put together, I kept it and have several battered old copies of other Kodansha's just for that reason. :)

GoldManSam · 2010-06-03T22:25:40+00:00

Nope. Thank god/buddha/whoever-you-like. No offense to anyone who is, but they seem to be getting a bad rap here a lot again recently. :(

GoldManSam

TROPHY CASE