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A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

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Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#201

Post by fireattack »

jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

>I find it considerably faster and easier to input hànzì on a smartphone than with a physical keyboard

As a native Chinese speaker I find the opposite.

>when the hànzì are presented directly above the on-screen keyboard

It's basically the same for most of "proper" PC IME. They start to appear when you're typing pinyin, and then you choose with numbers or space (for first one).

Showcase: https://i.imgur.com/gQGKw11.gif

So, IMHO there is no obvious advantage that smartphone's IME has over PC's here. And the speed of typing on physical keyboards beats smartphone by a mile, overally speaking.

---

However, I DO found that most of Japanese (which I'm a second-language user) IME on PC I tried having the problem that, you have to press some key (normally `enter` or `space`) to start "convert", and even another input to start choose between candidates, which is very tedious because you have to keep pressing `space` which IMO shouldn't be necessary

(Note: It was how most Chinese IME (Like Zhineng ABC) worked 10 years ago, but they got rid of redundant inputs later.)

Showcase (MS JP input, I knew it's not the best, so feel free to let me know how other IME function in these scenarios!): https://i.imgur.com/hwml1Sf.gif

Notice that I have to press space once first to enter "convert mode" (which breaks down your inputs to groups), and then press space again (for the first group) to make the candidates appear. I really don't get why it can't be like the Chinese IME.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#202

Post by makapuf »

plaidfuji wrote: post #176
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them Funny this is the problem. One of my major life lessons was learning not to always persevere, and to ask for help as soon as possible. Solves more problems faster, teaches you more ways of looking at a problem and smoothly scales to delegation.

This cannot be emphasized enough. In a social+technical work environment, the more you "persevere" on your own, the more you'll become pigeonholed as a tech guru who solves immediate problems but loses influence in the higher-level decisions of your organization. There's still a balance, though, as asking for too much help will lead to resentment and people just straight up thinking you're stupid.

I'm not sure it really is a good thing that being too good at something is leading to pigeonholing. It's a shame that what was before (or for other discipline) named mastery is now just seen as relegating from higher levels. Can you pigeonhole in medicine? Nuclear physics ? Professional football /sports ? Cooking ? I could go on. I'd frankly rather have people with less high level view and more knowing what it really means to do something before deciding to do it.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#203

Post by [deleted] »

hrktb wrote: post #174
carindistory wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Japanese native speaker who has to enter many Japanese texts on a daily basis both on a PC and on a smartphone, I feel obliged to point out that the quality of an IME (a piece of software providing possible kanji/alphabet sequences for a given phonetic relization), is far better on a PC (its built-in MS-IME, to be precise) than on a smartphone (iOS). I started looking for some example to show how bad iOS's IME i…

I think this might be the training (or lack of) of your device. I get it right on mine: https://imgur.com/a/83VCSwo Bear in mind I use a mac wih the same icloud account, and have years of data on it. Part of it must be shared. I haven’t use MS’IME in a long time, but I remember it being only marginally better than Apple’s. The main differentiators for me where names (places, stations, peoples).

[deleted]

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#204

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jpindar wrote: post #136
radicaldreamer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt you'll find a 14 year old who swipes at a book... kids very quickly learn context and rules of physics. It's much harder when some screens are touch screens and some are not, however, but I see adults trying to swipe non-touch screens all the time (mall displays, ads, iMacs etc.)

Try being an engineer who works with oscilloscopes and such. Some of them have touch screens with the buttons along the edges of the screen, and some have softkeys so the GUI looks exactly the same, but you press the buttons next to the screen.

I get this with fuel pumps, the screen isn't a touchscreen (in a brand new device in 2017) the "buttons" are just some subtle screen printing on a static panel (capacitive buttons I think), no affordance at all.

So the on-screen text says "touch here" or similar. Took me a while to realise it meant "press inside the screen-printed rectangle in the panel below the screen" ...

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#205

Post by makapuf »

astura wrote: post #168
ModernMech wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I mean, those didn't have spell check or word completion or copy/paste or even backspace. Do you know the pain of typing a wrong character on a typewriter? It gets old.

FWIW I had a typewriter in ~1995 that actually had a backspace. It had a white ribbon, similar to white out and it kept a small history buffer so it knew which key to erase. It was an amazing invention.

Yup i also were enthusiast with my grandfather modern typewriter which had a one line alphanumeric LCD where you could type one line, re read and correct it and it would print it only when you pressed return.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#206

Post by pbhjpbhj »

andybak wrote: post #87
21 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A computer is a machine of profound alienation from the actual ability to create and the ability to use A funny thing to say, given that today a lot of content requires computers to produce, even abstract art. > Many people will die having used computers for 10 hours a day but not being able to really act with computers and create with computers How is that different from people who voraciously read countless books…

I've had similar disagreements with people bemoaning VR for being isolating and non-social compared to other interactive media. Nobody decries reading literature for being somehow morally inferior to watching TV in a group.

>Nobody decries reading literature for being somehow morally inferior to watching TV in a group. //

Never heard the term "bookworm", it's a mild pejorative leveled at people who read books a lot.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#208

Post by WalterBright »

laurieg wrote: post #66
jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

This is definitely a big factor. When you look at a Japanese computer keyboard [1] you might see lots of Japanese characters on the keys. Almost nobody actually uses these to type. Instead, if you want a か(ka) character then you type k,a on the familiar qwerty keys. These phonetic characters then get converted into the more complex Chinese-origin characters as you go along, allowing you to disambiguate homophones. Th…

> Cast your mind back to when you first encountered a computer keyboard.

Does an IBM cardpunch keyboard count? :-)

Anyhow, I took a 2 week class in 8th grade to learn to touch type on a mechanical typewriter. It's paid off handsomely ever since.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#209

Post by ezoe »

This situation is not caused by complicated Japanese input methods. This is caused by young generation who don't use traditional computer with the keyboard.

It's another digital divide. Yes.

The generation who didn't have a personal computer in their young age is starting to retire.

Current 30s-40s years old workers are varies on computer literacy but many had a personal computer when they were a student. I belong to this generation.

I was hoping that the next generation will be completely digital native and all of them has computer literacy. Just laugh us and obliterate us from work force for we can't stand a chance against such a gifted digital native generation at birth. Just like we get rid of those annoying old people who don't have a computer literacy.

The invention of smartphone make that dream not happens. The smartphone makes people stupid. There is nothing smart about that computer.

The smartphone is inefficient and restricted computer. You don't have a freedom to choose the OS. You don't even have a root access to that very computer you own. It doesn't have a keyboard which is the most efficient input device for text. The smartphone is designed for reading the text, not for writing. So the young generation starting to lose the ability to write the text.

What makes me surprise is, that current students use the smartphone to read the papers, to write the necessary essay and reports necessary for graduation.

The fresh young generations who has just graduated enter the working class without learning how to use the keyboard. But the real work which involve a lot of text writing requires efficient input device such as the keyboard.

So the current trending of smartphone reduce the effective good workers from already reducing younger population in Japan.

I refuse to own a phone. Smartphone is the worst invention of our time. It disrupt attention, reduce computer literacy, or even plain literacy for it makes harder to write the text for most of them.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#210

Post by 2bitencryption »

nickserv wrote: post #190
21 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces. Why do you think this is a bad think? This is how kids learn how the world works, by trying the same thing in different contexts, like how small children put everything in their mou…

My worry with toddlers and touch interfaces is precisely because at that age they should be exploring the world, touching, tasting, smelling, feeling... By exposing them to something that doesn't react to the laws of physics, I fear they get a wrong first impression of the world, that at an early age they are not able to distinguish the difference between a book and a representation of one. I'm not against tablets, j…

this is once of those things where I'm 90% confident it isn't actually harmful to a young child...

...and yet if I had a child, I wouldn't expose them to tablets at a young age, just because that 10% is scary.

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