| > has been well worked out for Chinese and Japanese. Not really. Typing CJK text is a tedious and frustrating experience. People cope with it because no one has come up with a better alternative. Both Chinese and Japanese alphabets have way too many characters to fit on a keyboard. To deal with this, CJK users type in the English spelling and convert it to CJK characters using software called input method editors (IMEs). The problem is, this conversion process is often not straightforward. Unlike English, CJK sentences don't have spaces in them so IMEs have to guess how to split sentences into words. Then, it has to identify the right words, which is complicated due to the existence of homophones. To deal with all the ambiguity involved in this conversion process, IMEs rely on predictions to provide users with a list of possible conversion candidates. This leads to an awful typing experience in which users have to constantly choose from the IME-provided list for every little snippet of text. This is distracting, slows down typing, and makes key presses non-deterministic. To make matters worse, IMEs sometimes get things wrong and users have to get "creative" to work around it. In comparison, typing English text is a breeze. You can just type what you want directly. |