Friday, August 29, 2003

Japanes IME

This is just one of those things that scratches my tech itch... under MS-WindowsXP (and some older versions), there is an add-in called the "Input Method Editor" (IME) which is how MS-Windows allows you to enter non-western text using a western keyboard.

The basic concept is that you type in text using romaji (e.g. type in "anata") and the IME gives you the corresponding kana. If there are multiple kana/kanji, the space bar will bring up a list of all of the kanji/kana symbols that fit the current text. All in all, it's very slick, application independent (I was working with OpenOffice to test it out), and useful. Being able to type in using romaji makes it easier for someone like me who knows English instead of also having to learn how to use a Japanese keyboard.

Granted, it's still going to take me another 5 years to learn the language enough to be comfortable in it, but this gives me the ability to work without some proprietary program (other then using Microsoft...). I've only been really buckling down and trying to learn kana for about 5 or 6 months now. Of course, I've been watching anime for over a decade, so I know a lot of words and phrases, but much of that is without context, focus, and full of idiom that I don't have a good grasp on how the language is supposed to fit together. Since I am primarily a tactile/visual learner, it was time to switch to learning written Japanese instead - which requires that I learn grammer and spelling (which kana/kanji to use and when because multiple kanji can be pronounced identically).

So I've been grabbing any images of kana/kanji that I can get ahold of and slowly trying to tease meaning out of the symbols. Manga works well because there is context to go with the symbols. The wall in front of my desk is covered with tables of kana for quick reference and to help me slowly memorize the kana. Again no rush, I usually learn something new or puzzle something out once a week, which is slow but steady progress. Learning kanji is going to be the daunting task and will require buckling down and using flashcards and rote memorization until I get it down.

(Side-Notes)

The Japanese character set is comprised of 2 different types of characters. Kanji is a large set of pictorial symbols (thousands and thousands) which represent whole words / phrases / ideas. The usual rule of thumb that I hear is that you need to know 2,000 kanji to read a newspaper. Kana is a smaller set of phonetic symbols that can be used to spell out words that you may not know the kanji for. In addition, there are 2 types of Kana; Hiragana symbols are used to represent traditional japanese words, while Katakana symbols are used to represent words borrowed from other languages. (There is a 1:1 mapping between Hiragana and Katakana in that for every Katakana symbol, there is a Hiragana symbol.) There are maybe 100-120 hiragana symbols and 100-120 katakana symbols (too lazy to count). And since kana symbols match sylables it's easier to learn kana first.

Plus, there's the fun that most japanese is written vertically, top-to-bottom, but you read the columns from right-to-left. However, sometimes it is written horizontally which can be either left-to-right or right-to-left (still puzzling out how to tell which way to read horizontal text).

posted by Wuphon's at 12:03 AM