Wired Chinese and Japanese kids forget how to write Can you blame them?

Techeye ^ | 08/27/10 | Nick Farrell

[snowsislander]

To the Japanese, simplified Chinese looks the way teen text-speak appears to us.

That's a good analogy.

I find some of the PRC's simplified Chinese characters are even worse than text-speak is to English.

[lefty-lie-spy]

Its not only kids. I see it all the time at work with the adults too. If you don’t often write kanji, its easy to lose it.

[altair]

Do you mean using the iPhone style scheme in which letters pressed on the virtual keyboard create a pop-up of the letter, with less common alternatives appearing if you keep holding down the key?

No, but ...

CAVEAT: I've never really encountered an iPhone except at a farewell dinner where a soon-to-be-ex-colleague spent more time fiddling on his iPhone than socializing.

That sounds clumsy. A closer analogy is how multilingual cell phones work with T9 dictionary mode enabled.

For example, to get 漢字. You type KA N' JI and then select the proper symbols from a menu (you do not need to type the apostrophe, but all IMs I encountered in Japan let you type the apostrophe regardless). It's the same as XIM or XEmacs/Emacs only smarter because the dictionaries are better. It's very fast.

[Cronos]

Thai is based on Sanskrit?

[JimSEA]

The script is based on Pali and is phonetic rather than pictographic. The language itself is not based on Sanskrit.

[Cronos]

Ok, I did not know that the script was based on Pali! Thank you, that was interesting — something more for me to red up on!