
How China Sidestepped QWERTY - sohkamyung
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v549/n7671/full/549158a.html
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lkramer
Interesting enough article, however it's a bit odd captioning a Japanese woman
using (presumably) a Japanese typewriter with the text "Early Chinese
typewriters had thousands of keys to search through."

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wholien
That's my first thought as well, but the picture could have been a kanji (or
just straight Japanese) typewriter, which is similar enough to a Chinese
typewriter that it makes sense to use the image. But with that in mind, the
caption does not make sense. The author or whoever inserted images probably
did not know the woman was Japanese.

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GrumpyNl
Google is your friend ;)
[https://www.google.nl/search?q=chinese+typewriter&safe=off&d...](https://www.google.nl/search?q=chinese+typewriter&safe=off&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjc497x9qbWAhWLfFAKHYelBowQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=928#imgrc=mmJHxtbnJossyM):

~~~
fhood
....maybe....we hope....privacy issues notwithstanding.

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dracodoc
The title make it look like something relate to alternative keyboard layout,
but it's actually just typewriter before computer age.

I also don't like this kind of claim:

> Ultimately, their work led to today's sophisticated predictive-text engines,
> which benefit from increasing processing power and cloud integration.

I highly doubt the modern IME and text engines ever take any hint from this
part of history.

~~~
yorwba
The MingKwai does sound similar to the Wubi (五笔 ⸺ 5 strokes) method. You type
the individual components of a character or word, and any ambiguity is
resolved by selecting from a short list.

For example, 比如 (= "for example") is typed "xxvk", where "x" → 匕, "v" → 女, "k"
→ 口. 名字 (= "name") is typed "qkpb", where "q" → 夕, "k" → 口, "p" → 宀， "b" → 子.

Of course most keys can stand for several characters (or components), and it
can be hard to tell which one to use (for me), but the amount of ambiguity is
surprisingly small.

~~~
dracodoc
It's familiar because that's the only way to do it with shape. You either
select a character by shape or by pinyin. The key challenge here is to design
a system that

1\. can cover most characters with relative small shape collection 2\. use
less selection steps 3\. easy to learn and memorize

Wubi is optimized on the goal to determine a character with 4 shapes with
almost no alternative candidate, so the raw input speed is optimized (4
keystroke for one character, and you don't need to select in most time), but
it require a lot of time learning. That enabled typewriter as an job.

Later people found pinyin + good word prediction can achieve acceptable speed,
the typewriter job doesn't exist anymore.

However it's still quite painful to input ancient Chinese prose, because most
of them are single character word, so you have to select from a long list of
characters with same pinyin (in word mode you just input pinyin of two
characters, the pinyin combination have much less alternatives). Some pinyin
have about 20-30 common used characters, like "ji", "yi" etc.

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maoeurk
It's worth pointing out that in China, QWERTY with pinyin (Latin characters
representing pronunciation with an IME mapping it to Chinese) is the most
popular input method.

Japanese similarly is primarily done with QWERTY and an IME. Other layouts do
exist but they're not very common.

Chinese input is quite varied though. Taiwan uses Zhuyin (or bopomofo) which
is a phonetic alternative that doesn't use Latin. Hong Kong, Cantonese, and/or
misc. types of Chinese may use other methods like Cangjie (which does use a
QWERTY layout). Cangjie is notable for not being phonetic at all -- likely
similar to the typewriter input methods mentioned in the article. Words are
typed as ordered sequences of pseudo-radicals (pieces of Chinese characters)
that are memorized by their associations to Latin letters and color[0].

Although there's no real reason either Japanese or pinyin IMEs should have to
use QWERTY -- in fact it's likely quite suboptimal as neither make use of all
the keys, or at least not as a primary function (many IMEs are configurable
and/or allow non-standard characters to map to more complex sequences of
input). I personally use both through Dvorak (which, being optimized for
English, is similarly suboptimal).

As for voice input, Chinese is easier than Japanese because of the larger
phonetic inventory and use of tones to form minimal pairs. Although the
different types of Chinese (regional dialects (as opposed to different Chinese
languages)) and their variations in pronunciation complicate things. Japanese
does have pitch accent, but it's not really consistent across Japan, so I
don't know how helpful it would actually be for a voice recognition system.

Purely from personal experience, I can rarely get Japanese voice recognition
to work if trying to search for a word in isolation. It's quite good with
sentences though. This might just be an artifact of my poor pronunciation
though.

I think typing in general, as it is now, is pretty primitive and has a lot of
room to be improved. I've been tempted to try to make some new, and possibly
more efficient, input methods, but haven't been able to justify giving any a
try yet. I do think even an IME at the level of what currently exists in
Chinese and Japanese would be wonderful to have for English though.
Intelligent auto-complete, shortcuts, semantically aware insertion of unicode
(Emoji are actually natural to use in IME-using languages; just type what you
want and select the emoji that pops up).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#/media/File:%E5%80%89%E9%A0%A1%E8%BC%B8%E5%85%A5%E6%B3%95_%E6%8B%86%E7%A2%BC.jpg)

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addicted
I'd imagine that the fact that the vast majority of the rest of the world uses
QWERTY makes it quite useful for the Japanese and Chinese to also use QWERTY
despite the minor loss in optimal typing layout.

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Laforet
The kinds of keyboard you will find in Japan are all heavily localised with
different mapping for symbols and a number of context switching keys squeezed
in at the expense of the space bar[0]. This is usually not a problem for
typing Japanese because words are not delimited by whitespace, however it can
be awkward to type English on them especially if you have hands larger than
the average Japanese office worker. China, on the other hand, uses US layout
qwerty keyboards almost exclusively.

[0]:[https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/81Te5RdGMTL...](https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/81Te5RdGMTL._SL1500_.jpg)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
China never developed specialized keyboards since they were still not using
many computers in the 70s/80s when this was a trend. Japan and Taiwan both
developed pretty specialized keyboards for Japanese and Chinese, respectively,
though this turned out to be not as productive as just using slightly modified
QWERTY (which is why china didn't go down this same route in the 90s).

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kwoff
"transformed the Chinese keyboard into a 'smart' peripheral, much more
sophisticated at taking instructions from the user than its static, rather
stupid alphabetic cousin" \- also can ensure what you type conforms to CCP
dictates - see also: newspeak - pinyin ban incoming?

