Re: Megami71

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:33:26 -0500, The Wanderer
<inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Captain Nerd wrote:

In article <duednYkzWYwX1YHZRVn-qg@xxxxxxxxxxx>, The Wanderer
<inverseparadox@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That said, ISTR that someone on this group said "There's really
no such thing as Romaji. Learn Kana."

I *do* know kana, but since I have no means of entering or
manipulating it better than "type romaji into JEDI and
copy-and-paste the search results", I work primarily with romaji.
Find me a better solution (which a: allows me to enter *any* kana
easily and b: does not require me to type in someone else's romaji
scheme in order to do so - JEDI doesn't fit b:, but is clunky
enough that that's not a big consideration), and I'll consider
using it.

I don't know if an equivalent method exists in Windows (surely it
must)

I believe it does, but I wouldn't know for certain.

but MacOS Japanese language support lets you switch between Hiragana,
Katakana and Romaji text processing. On text input you type in
romaji and it automatically converts to the equivalent kana in
whatever text window you're typing in.

But in *what* romaji?

The MS IME is pretty flexible. Works with hepburn, the Kunrei
(Ministry of Education approved!), and the bastardizsed JSL that our
school's textbook inflicts upon us. If you chosen characters
correspond to any one of the the three, it ought to come up fine.

Some schemes out there are Very Close to what I
use by habit, but none I've encountered is quite the same, and (more
importantly) none will reliably let me enter, say, a small ? - and I've
wanted to do that on more than one occasion. I've never seen any
romanization system but my own which provides a clear, unambiguous means
of representing all such small characters.

I would ideally prefer something which would permit me to define my own
mapping between "romaji sequence" and "single kana", just handling the
actual processing code by itself.

There is one other option... If you look around hard enough, you can
find kana keyboards. I grabbed a few when they showed up at the local
discount store, discounted as "Chinese Keyboards". :-) Even had the
"Hiragana/katakana/kanji" select button.

However, both Mac and Windows solutions are of limited or no use to me,
since I run Linux.

<insert write it yourself joke here>

How is the language support in Linux fairing anyway? I run a debian
box for my school-dev work, but I can't say I've ever tried anything
fancy with it.

It also automatically picks a kanji with the same on- or kun-reading,
and allows you to pick from any other kanji that sound the same.

I've heard tell of this feature (or other similar ones) in various input
methods, and it does sound useful - but I've never had the opportunity
to try it myself, and the inconvenience of having to use someone else's
romanization scheme (even in the unlikely event that it is *not* less
versatile than mine) remains a potential obstacle in any case.

I'm not sure how you could enter kana with a qwerty keyboard without
typing in the equivalent romaji,

From what I'm told, that's exactly how every existing Japanese input
method works: type in romaji, convert to kana/kanji. If there's an
alternative, other than drawing the characters on a pressure-sensitive
surface and relying on handwriting recognition (which seems clunky at
best to me), I've never come across it.

I've done hand written entry, and it's by far my preferred method of
character entry for kana and kanji. Given the japanese language love
for homophones, it's faster for me than trying to do romaji input. I
type faster in english since writing a roman character takes more
strokes than a single keypress. In the case of kana, it's a minimum
two keystrokes per kana rate, and then there's the time involved in
picking the correct kanji interpretation. If you know them and you
can already write them (Which I really can't do, save for a hundred or
so common ones) I'd bet it'd be faster to scribble them out.

That said, when using my PDA for this purpose, I've working with an
area that's easily 4 times the size of the typical notebook touchpad,
and if I've got the tablet running, I've got a whole 8.5x11 (A4?)
sized space to work with, which makes entry a joy. It could just be
me, but I find it much easier and more natural to write kanji than to
type romaji and convert.


(Abraham, I'll try to get to your post later, I'm going to have to leave
for work fairly soon.)
--
"ZAKKENAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Abraham Evangelista
.

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