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

Post by codedokode » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

carindistory wrote: post #142

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…

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…

Post by codedokode » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:38 AM UTC

Mefis wrote: post #195

jdietrich wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is the video representative of texting speed, or is this the fastest human in the world? From what I understand, he's on the faster end of the normal range. >Are they making choices that would take effort in a different system, or just clicking the next suggested letter? With Japanese kanji or Chinese hànzì, there's no practical way to directly input such a large range of characters. Users type a phonetic spelling,…

For Chinese hanzi, some people also use a stroke input method. You are presented with ~10 possible strokes that make up all hanzi, and by selecting them in the correct order you can write a character.

Post by kart23 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

Mistri wrote: post #274

I'm in high school. I know how to double click, I know how to work with excel spreadsheets. I plan to pursue a CS degree and eventually get an engineering job in the future. Heck, I even read Hacker News. Yes, us teens are on our smartphones a lot, but the majority of us know how to use computers... this article is pretty misleading.

Post by Crespyl » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #282

laurieg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The advantage of "flick" keyboard is probably that the buttons are larger than buttons on a latin keyboard. Hitting and sliding the finger seems like a more complicated action than just hitting a letter, but maybe that is just because I don't use it often.

Post by rjplatte » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:17 AM UTC

Crespyl wrote: post #287

codedokode wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of "flick" keyboard is probably that the buttons are larger than buttons on a latin keyboard. Hitting and sliding the finger seems like a more complicated action than just hitting a letter, but maybe that is just because I don't use it often.

I've known an english variant of the "flick" keyboard (MessageEase) since my first smartphone. I find the flick/tap-and-drag gestures to be vastly more comfortable and natural than trying to use my thumbs to peck at a QWERTY soft keyboard and relying on predictive algorithms to make up the speed loss. An additional benefit is that this approach provides more room for additional symbols and layers that are more of a b…