46 replies to this topic

[nishishei]

    For me, I can input at least 100 characters with pinyin in a minute, but others could do at least 300 with "Wubi""five stroke"五笔,  top to 500 by a professional typist.

You can type at least 100 characters with pinyin in a minute? That's impressive for sure. But I am highly doubtful, that's nearly a character every half second. This is impossible unless you are talking about 100 characters on pinyin without selecting the proper Chinese character and letting the input AI do all the choosing. The average is 20-30 characters per minute via Hanyu Pinyin (and that's with AI on, since the AI is not perfect).

Wubi and professional typists don't count.
A stenographer can reach 230/min in English words as well, An English word is about equivalent to 2 Chinese characters on the average.

The lack of index is a disadvantage, but it is not crucial.

Not crucial is subjective. A romanization supporter can say the preservation of culture is non-crucial also (compared to say more pressing issues of literacy, compatibility, reference material publishing, and worldwide promotion).

[hira]

Didn't Indians have Sanskrit?

That's the classical language of the northern part of the country; Tamil's don't feel attached to that; and its hell to study. Actually the most succesful intent of a national language was Hindi, which is widely spoken in the north, but India is just too diverse; and people won't stop speaking their languages in favor of that of their neighbours that easily. English is the only culturally neutral language, so it's de-facto the lingua franca there.

hand-writing is obsolete; most people just write in their PCs nowadays, and the trend will get worse with time. Kinda stupid to change a whole system to ease hand-writing when nobody writes by hand after leaving school.

[Klamath]

You can type at least 100 characters with pinyin in a minute?  That's impressive for sure. But I am highly doubtful, that's nearly a character every half second.  This is impossible unless you are talking about 100 characters on pinyin without selecting the proper Chinese character and letting the input AI do all the choosing.  The average is 20-30 characters per minute via Hanyu Pinyin (and that's with AI on, since the AI is not perfect).

If I just type single characters which no relevance with each other, I can't achieve. If I type an article, it's possible, and even more than 150. It always depend on what kind of software you use, the speed you type letters,and also depends on your grasp of word compounds 词组. For example , type "lishi" 历史,or type "ls",you can get the word you want as fast as possible. It's lower efficient to type "历” and then "史”.There are many tactics could reduce redundant procedure. Microsoft AI is still quite primitive now.

Not crucial is subjective.  A romanization supporter can say the preservation of culture is non-crucial also (compared to say more pressing issues of literacy, compatibility, reference material publishing, and worldwide promotion).

What's your point ?

[Klamath]

A stenographer can reach 230/min in English words as well, An English word is about equivalent to 2 Chinese characters on the average.

There are different explanation for this.
Maybe I should trust your stastics. But english has more strict grammar structures than chinese does.Which must contain more words in a sentence to show an meaning precisely, while chinese doesn't have this problem. A corner can't reflect the whole room, right? Chinese can tranfer more information than english does in an same article.
E.g Try translate some ancient readings , like the history records, 史记， I won't believe english could use less words as it did.
Even those present new Hanyu(白话).

[lobster]

The keyboard is designed for European languages. It's no surprised typing European languages is much faster.

[phoenix_bladen]

SO is there a possiblility there would be a reform in the Mandarin language? What is the possibility of this ........and would this affect the other chinese languages as well ?

[nishishei]

But english has more strict grammar structures than chinese does.Which must contain more words in a sentence to show an meaning precisely, while chinese doesn't have this problem. A corner can't reflect the whole room, right?  Chinese can tranfer more information than english does in an same article.
   E.g Try translate some ancient readings , like the history records, 史记， I won't believe english could use less words as it did.

This is a completely different issue. Classical Chinese adopts implied grammar and allusions to get to the point, you cannot discount the amount of time and effort required to memorize these allusions that in an English sentence is all spelled out for you. In any case, we Chinese do not write in Classical Chinese anymore, partly because of the time expenditure and also because of its very IMPRECISION. Classical Chinese is decent in literature and poetry, but very deficient in logical abstraction; you need to induce in Classical Chinese, while in English you can deduce. The statistic that an English word is about 2 Chinese characters applies to the vernaculars of both language.

[lobster]

The statistic that an English word is about 2 Chinese characters applies to the vernaculars of both language.

Any such statistics based on syllables?

[hira]

The keyboard is designed for European languages.  It's no surprised typing European languages is much faster.

designed for which language? there's a lot of them, you know. And even between many related languages writing is quite different.
I've actually read a lot about how the QWERTY keyboard was designed quite randomly, and is very inefficient.

Edited by hira, 16 June 2005 - 02:15 PM.

[lobster]

designed for which language? there's a lot of them, you know. And even between many related languages writing is quite different.
I've actually read a lot about how the QWERTY keyboard was designed quite randomly, and is very inefficient.

I would appreciate if you can give examples of keyboards specifically designed for non-European character sets and IMEs.

[hira]

hangul? bopomofo? and I guess arabs and slavs have their own sets.
i don't see typing pinyin any harder than typing spanish. Of course hanzi conversion can be slow, but that can't be helped.

[jwrevak]

Completely disagree with the last statement.  Knowing 3000 characters without knowing the compounds is like learning 3000 Latin, Greek and Germanic roots in English. 

I agree. I think you have to know well over 3,000 characters, not to mention "compounds".

I would also add that Chinese adds new words too. All languages except "dead" ones do.

Sure you have an educated idea what the word means, but that's all you got, an idea.  But now think about the burden of Chinese characters: difficulty in finding unknown characters in dictionary, difficulty in indexing them (most Chinese books lack an index because of this),

So what kind of indexes do Chinese books have when they do have them? Obviously they are not alphabatized (unless you're using pinyin) so what do they do? Break things down by a limited number of major topics? Use a system of radicals like dictionaries frequently do?

[jwrevak]

designed for which language? there's a lot of them, you know. And even between many related languages writing is quite different.
I've actually read a lot about how the QWERTY keyboard was designed quite randomly, and is very inefficient.

No, the QWERTY keyboard was not designed randomly but, amazingly, it was designed to be slow you down. When the mechanical typewriter was first developed they discovered that if the operator typed too fast, the machine frequently jammed. The solution? Redesign the keybaord so that the operator is forced to slow down. The result was the QWERTY keyboard. It and close variations on it are still standard--even on the most modern computers.

[jwrevak]

See this article for why Chinese cannot, should not, and will not be latinized.

The example is irrelevant to this discussion. Nobody ever writes or speaks like the example at the above link.

[lobster]

The example is irrelevant to this discussion.  Nobody ever writes or speaks like the example at the above link.

It's an example written to Sun Yat-sen to show the impossibility of replacing Chinese script with Roman Characrers.