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japanime

macrumors 68030
Feb 27, 2006
2,916
4,844
Japan
Hi,
I am going to be moving to Japan in 2 months. Does this firmware include a kanji to English dictionary for translation purposes? If so, I AM BUYING AN iPhone immediately. Can anyone help answer this?
-A

If you buy an iPhone now, it won't be 3G-compatible, meaning it won't work on Japan's cellular network. Best wait until you arrive here and see if NTT's DoCoMo (or another provider) are selling a 3G iPhone by then.
 

!¡ V ¡!

macrumors 6502a
Jun 21, 2007
850
0
If anyone here still believes :apple:'s lies that the iPhone is not Newton/PDA/Tablet PC, they must really crawl out from used that rock.

:apple: will always play the deny and then a few months/years later release what was denied. People here have some great ideas on where :apple: is heading in the coming years with it's technology, too bad these same people will age 2-3 years before they can ever prove they assumptions were correct. ;)
 

RexTraverse

macrumors 6502
Feb 10, 2008
259
0
I can't imagine anyone who would actually buy an iPhone, that needs Chinese input, that isn't already familiar and infinitely faster with pinyin input or a zhuyin keyboard layout. Seems like a nice tech demo but a waste on iPhone. The near impossibility to quickly write a somewhat complex character (>10 strokes) without a stylus also seems to be self-defeating. Would be much more useful with a tablet Mac or other large touchscreen.
 

junker

macrumors 6502
Really? ...no - really?

I'm sorry. I just don't get the excitement. You guys are telling me you'd rather write in each letter/word, hope that it correctly identified than type/tap it?

I think MAYBE some people could use this and use it well (medical field for 'scripts or something), but I've had this on a MS Tablet and sure, Apple will do it better, but even when it worked well on the tablet, I got tired of it. I went back to typing real quick.

I have a very large hands (can easily palm a b-ball) use the iphone and have become quite adept at using the small keyboard.

Maybe I'm missing it, but I feel this is just fanboi-ism - "New+Apple=AWESOME!!!"
 

c6h6benzene

macrumors newbie
May 5, 2008
2
0
Well you have three dragons,
white = a blank tile.
red = the sympbol shown here painted red
green = green shrubbery (it isnt one that i know of) :)


So it could just be the generic english terms to make the game easier as a whole bunch of English speakers mispronouncing Chinese words doesn't make things move along much better.

In Chinese these three tiles are called as the following repestively:
white = 白板 (white plate)
red = explained before, 红中 ("Middle" in red)
green = 青發 ("Fortune" in green),發 as in 恭喜發財, meaning "(go) make a fortune"

Back to topic.

This is great! Does this confirm iPhone is getting into China? Or Apple really intends to sell iPhone in China? Huuray!
 

nastebu

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2008
354
0
kanji characters

Apple, why are you doing this to us?
Kana input is fine, but without kanji handwriting recognition, it's almost useless as a dictionary.

I can't believe this!

Did you look at the picture? There were options in the pull-down menu for the kanji. Handwriting recognition would be great, but as long as you can get kanji through the keyboard, we're golden.
 

DotComCTO

macrumors 6502
Aug 17, 2006
311
41
That character looks awfully close to the Red Dragon tiles in Mah Jongg. Not sure if there is anything else close to that character though.

Can anyone confirm this?

It is. The character itself is "zhong" (middle). Of course, on a Mah Jongg set, the character would be red (hong).

:D

--DotComCTO

(Oops! It seems 5 other people have answered the question...sorry!)
 

Apple Ink

macrumors 68000
Mar 7, 2008
1,918
0
The big question is......

Will Apple give in and ship in a stylus as well with the next iteration of iPhone???

Can somebody actually tell if its possible to have capacitance and stylus screens together as one ?
 

stephenli

macrumors 6502
Jul 1, 2004
286
0
I'm confused. If you can use a computer using a keyboard to input in Chinese, why do you need handwriting recognition? Why not just use the same keyboard?

well. sometimes its really really difficult to type a certin characters... and thats why handwriting recognition is considered to be nice!
It would be even better to include it into "ink" on OSX....pleaseeee
 

HiRez

macrumors 603
Jan 6, 2004
6,250
2,576
Western US
*fingers crossed for Japanese*
This image shows Japanese Hiragana, so yes, it appears to be in there, or in development at least. Given that, I'd also assume Korean might be a strong possibility -- well really, if they have the engine to do that recognition, it can probably be applied to any written language without too much trouble.
 

Simmerl

macrumors member
Aug 25, 2007
69
0
Did you look at the picture? There were options in the pull-down menu for the kanji. Handwriting recognition would be great, but as long as you can get kanji through the keyboard, we're golden.

Well, now imagine you're reading a book and come across this word:

普通選挙法

and you don't know how it's pronounced. How do you look it up in an online dictionary? You can't.
This is where the iPhone ceases to be useful for students of Japanese.

PS: It's 1925's General Election Law.
 

Pigumon

macrumors 6502
Aug 4, 2004
441
1
It has japanese input.

Not really. Chinese and other languages like it will generally have a romanji (roman letter based) spelling for words. This romanji form can then be transformed (with the space bar generally) into the 'complex' character forms of the language. When there's more than one character for that romanji (which there generally is) you'll be prompted for which character you really want, just like the screen shot shows at the right side of the screen. This is how I'm able to type in Japanese on my Mac while having a US keyboard. There are more specific keyboards like the one arn linked to, but it can all be done with a standard ascii keyboard.

喝采 (cheers)

Hmm, you type japanese on your Mac, but you still don't know it's called ROMAJI not ROMANJI? :p

Anyway, if you go to the wretch site, the 8th pic shows Japanese input.

http://www.wretch.cc/album/show.php?i=kendi08land&b=5&f=1842902183.jpg&p=8

Also as stated 中 (center, middle) is the same character as the red dragon in Mah Jong, 中国 as the name of china refers to ancient China's belief that it was the Center of the world.

It's also RED SQUADRON'S symbol in STAR WARS!

But one error here is that the white dragon is a blank tile. It isn't. Blank tiles are SPARE tiles incase you lose one, you can carve or write the missing tile's characters on it.
White Dragons are the tiles with a fancy black (or blue) outline.

http://www.honeyandpearl.co.nz/images/tiles/honwhitedragon.jpg

Back to topic, Chinese is spoken more than any other language in the world, and china is currently the fastest growing nation, so this is a great move for apple. My friend has told me it's still easier to find a specific chinese character by recognition rather than pinyin or other romanized input methods.

Japanese is syllable based, every japanese character can be represented by 1, 2, or 3 letter combinations. Chinese on the other hand is ideogram based and terribly hard to represent with 26 letters, especially when there can be 10 different ways to pronounce a single sound in chinese!!
 

iAlan

macrumors 65816
Dec 11, 2002
1,142
1
Location: Location:
So since they've added Chinese, is it safe to assume that Japanese, Korean, etc. will be in the final version?

I was thinking the same. The character set in the image is not limited to just 'Chinese' as Japanese use kanji.

Regarding using your finger to write the character, i would like to think the software recognizes stroke order and determines the character - as kanji is supposed to be written a specific way with the strokes going from left to right , top to bottom.

Can't wait to learn more about this.

iPhone Japan, bring it on...
 

Merkuryy

macrumors regular
Jun 10, 2007
175
0
Shanghai, China
So since they've added Chinese, is it safe to assume that Japanese, Korean, etc. will be in the final version?

Chinese is more complicated to be scanned than Japanese and Korean, so when we finish handling with my motherland language, a step on Korean and Japanese will be far more easier. BTW, this hugely mean AAPL is going to expend its Chinese market, good news foe me;)
 

windowpain

macrumors 6502a
Apr 19, 2008
590
100
Japan
As many people have already stated, you can already type in japanese on the ipod touch/iphone. It supports multiple keyboards, what it doesn't do is allow you to flip the screen into landscape mode so that you can actually type on the thing. The buttons become tiny, and I can't be the only one that finds it tough..
(how are people here supposed to type and ride a bicycle at the same time! ;))

Imagine typing on a keyboard 35% smaller than the English one and you get the idea.

Also a dictionary that you can search for the kanji by radical would be awesome. The touch interface would make this very powerful. Add on the dictionary from leopard and these things would be very nice indeed!
 

crooks1782

macrumors newbie
May 5, 2008
4
0
Albuquerque, NM
Well, now imagine you're reading a book and come across this word:

普通選挙法

and you don't know how it's pronounced. How do you look it up in an online dictionary? You can't.
This is where the iPhone ceases to be useful for students of Japanese.

PS: It's 1925's General Election Law.

I haven't seen any other device for kanji input/recognition until this. I know a little Japanese, but learning kanji is really tedious. And without knowing kanji you can't read even the most basic things like a restaurant menu. I think that this will be great for native Asian iPhone users and perhaps even more useful (at least in the technological life-line sense) to foreigners visiting Asia. I'm extremely excited!!
 

bhsu21

macrumors 6502
Feb 25, 2008
333
0
Jacksonville, FL
anyone know if I can type Traditional Chinese characters (I'm in Taiwan) in my Iphone using Pinyin? Right now I have NativeCN but it seems to only have Simplified Chinese with Pinyin.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way or there isn't now?
 

iSamurai

macrumors 65816
Nov 9, 2007
1,024
6
ɹǝpun uʍop 'ǝuɐqsı&#
太棒了!!!

我等了好久喔~ 目前是用NativeCn, 但好慢、好難用。
我以為是第三方發明的,但是好像是原生蘋果的^_^
希望也有繁體拼音因為用拼音輸入中文比較快。用手寫的會累歪...

anyway since this post is about chinese input I think it's appropriate to post in chinese.

===edit P.S.===
Oh, "普通選挙法"

this is japanese... because in either traditional or simplified chinese these characters won't exist in the same sentence lol
but in jap I know it does as fewer characters were simplified compared to SimCh. Personally I use/write traditional chinese.

traditional chinese:
普通選舉法
simplified chinese:
普通选挙法

I hope they'll bring out some sort of japanese input as well.
 

weili

macrumors newbie
May 5, 2008
8
0
My friend has told me it's still easier to find a specific chinese character by recognition rather than pinyin or other romanized input methods.
That's not necessarily true.

The typical day to day typing could be easily done easily by using a phonetic input system, be it Hanyu Pinyin (mainland China & Singapore) or Zhuyin Fuhao (Taiwan), or some variation of Cantonese phonetic input (Hong Kong).

One misconception many people have is that each character is its own "word", which is simply not true. Each character does indeed have its own meaning but most modern Chinese words are formed with two or more characters. For example, highway is 高速公路 gaosu gonglu, literally meaning "high-speed public-road", if you break up those four characters, the word loses its meaning. So if I were to input that word in Chinese on a computer, all I have to do is type "gaosugonglu" and the computer would choose those four corresponding characters. See how easy it can be?

Japanese is syllable based, every japanese character can be represented by 1, 2, or 3 letter combinations. Chinese on the other hand is ideogram based and terribly hard to represent with 26 letters, especially when there can be 10 different ways to pronounce a single sound in chinese!!
That's not quite true.

Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic and phonetic, but a good amount of Japanese text is still in Kanji, which is simply Chinese character. In fact, the word Kanji 漢字 itself literally means "Han characters", Han being the largest Chinese ethnic group.

Chinese characters, Hanzi/Kanji, are not all ideograms either. Majority of modern Chinese characters are actually semanto-phonetic.

Also, there is absolutely nothing hard about representing spoken Chinese with 26 letters and there are NOT "10 different ways to pronounce a single sound in Chinese"...

Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao represents spoken Mandarin Chinese perfectly with phonetic letters, the former with Roman letters, the latter with "simplified Chinese characters" not dissimilar to Japanese Hiragana and Katakana.
 

nastebu

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2008
354
0
Well, now imagine you're reading a book and come across this word:

普通選挙法

and you don't know how it's pronounced. How do you look it up in an online dictionary? You can't.

PS: It's 1925's General Election Law.

Ummm... yes you can. The same way you look up a kanji in a regular dictionary--by sorting by radical and counting strokes. People have been looking up kanji for 2000 years without iPhones.
 
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