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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

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Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#71

Post by nshepperd »

_5659 wrote: post #2

I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load. Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want…

> Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text.

That sounds great tbh. Not everything needs to be a 4MB bootstrap.js webshit that doesn't even load with adblockers enabled.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#72

Post by pcurve »

namuol wrote: post #27

(Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist) The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criti…

Japanese is fast for sure, I'm not sure if your theory explain why Spanish is close second behind... (honestly I have no idea either)

https://ahtaitay.blogspot.com/2020/07/as-native-speakers-we-...

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#73

Post by s1300045 »

fyolnish wrote: post #63
japgolly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement. - Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables - Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially) What about…

Why’s it so hot today? 何でこんなに暑いの今日？ Where in the US are you from? 出身は米国の何処ですか? Japanese sentences are usually shorter than the english translation.

I speak Mandarin Chinese. They are kind of similar.

今天怎麼這麼熱？

美國那來的？

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#74

Post by Jakobeha »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #48

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and pr…

I can't read the sites, but looking at some of them, I might honestly prefer US websites looking like the Japanese ones instead of the boring, spread-out, slow-loading versions I see today.

Even in the author's website. It's not bad per se, and it seems to load fast. But there is more spacing than necessary, and the minimalism makes it look like any other blog.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#75

Post by pcurve »

euske wrote: post #70
namuol wrote: post #27

(Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist) The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criti…

As a Japanese native who's fluent in English, I disagree with this. I regularly translate English (mostly technical) texts to Japanese, and the translation I get is roughly the same size as the original. Its density is certainly not "very low". The reason that you might think that Japanese is more "bloated" is probably because the form of the language you hear most - in TV news and speeches - are in the "polite" form…

i agree. The length is roughly the same, if not actually shorter in many cases. Syllables per second isn't a good measure of information density.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#76

Post by [deleted] »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #48

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and pr…

[deleted]

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#77

Post by Jach »

fyolnish wrote: post #63
japgolly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement. - Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables - Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially) What about…

Why’s it so hot today? 何でこんなに暑いの今日？ Where in the US are you from? 出身は米国の何処ですか? Japanese sentences are usually shorter than the english translation.

For paid translations, English likes to charge by the word, whereas Japanese charges by the character. The rule of thumb for conversion is 2 JP characters --> 1 English word i.e. translating a 1000 character JP document you'll expect about 500 EN words at the end.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#78

Post by [deleted] »

sjg007 wrote: post #34
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "crammed" design allows for button-function coupling, which makes buttons stateless and predictable.

I don’t know about anyone else but the move to touch screens has been awful. I don’t need 2 menu layers to adjust the air temp or seat heater. All I really want is apple carplay.

[deleted]

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#79

Post by akhilcacharya »

ekianjo wrote: post #69
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #48

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and pr…

> Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding. So I guess still using Fax Machines to do business in 2020 is not "behind", it's just "different" right? Let's call a cat a cat when we see one.

I think for 40-something years Japan was held as a futuristic, technologically advanced country in America even after Japan's stagnation and the American consumer tech renaissance of the last 20 years. It's clear to me that people can't accept that America is the most technologically advanced nation on Earth, and has been.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#80

Post by majormajor »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #48

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and pr…

I think there's a temptation to subscribe to a "progress is inevitable and recency is a reflection of quality" view, especially amongst tech-oriented people.

I think this is very similar to discussions of payments in the US vs China, with QR codes vs credit cards. Credit cards are old tech now, and so a country building out a ton of infrastructure today has no real reason to follow that path now that there are alternatives. But a country with a ton of infrastructure already built for them also doesn't have much incentive to rip all that out and replace it. So something primarily determined by "what was the state of tech when building out infrastructure for the first time" now gets used to answer a question of "who is a more advanced society?"

(Here it's more a question of "what were influential design trends" instead of "when did you build your infrastructure" but that's a similarly arbitrary starting seed, as it were, not a reflection of "progress.")

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