iPhone 2.0 Japanese Keyboard Video

[kaician]

also the same reason that a bunch of NORMAL japanese phones are including touch sensitive screens and handwriting recognition. as well as dictionaries with handwriting recognition having high status. searching by stroke order is good to know, but most people use it because it's cheaper to implement and ubiquitos. handwriting's price of entry is a touchscreen...
it's like saying that searching with a paper dictionary is the best way to search because anyone can do it. just because anyone can do it and it's cheaper than electronic search methods doesn't automatically make it better and more efficient...

 

[nakobear]

Chinese character recognition includes the Japanese characters! I assure you... Kanji is "traditional" Chinese, they're exactly the same and have the same meanings! Exact same meanings, they're just pronounced differently, and compounds have different meanings. But... the handwriting recognition can't do compounds... what you do is enter characters using it, and then combine them together to get compounds. If you're using Japanese text entry then it shows the possible kana for the kanji (because compounds can be different depending on the context). But if you know your stuff it's easy to guess from that...

Nowadays the Chinese use "simplified" Chinese. But older people still know their traditional Chinese, so I'd doubt the handwriting recognition doesn't include traditional Chinese characters (AKA Japanese kanji).

I'm a native Japanese speaker and studied Chinese in college. Japanese characters are a combination of both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Trust me, I used to get lectured by my TA because she wanted me to "pick" which one to use instead of mixing it up (only because I'm used to writing in Japanese...sometimes the characters that Japanese use are the simplified version). Also, not all Japanese characters mean the same in Chinese. Certain characters like "mother" are different in Chinese and Japanese so I don't know if that would make the Chinese recognition software work.

I'm certainly looking forward to testing it out to see how well it works though!

 

[halpin]

Leopard's dictionary

Does anyone know if the JP/EN dictionary included with Leopard will make it to the iPhone, or if some translation dictionary is included with 2.0?

I also want to buy a DS, purely for some Kanji learning games. Hopefully, these will make it onto the iPhone.

The hardware exists for the iPhone to be a DS and a dictionary; it would be incredibly poor on Apple's part if they weren't trying to make a dent in the DS market (Learning tools for Japanese children and students of Japanese) and the electronic dictionary market.

Thoughts?

 

[CaptainHaddock]

Does anyone know if the JP/EN dictionary included with Leopard will make it to the iPhone, or if some translation dictionary is included with 2.0?

I also want to buy a DS, purely for some Kanji learning games. Hopefully, these will make it onto the iPhone.

The hardware exists for the iPhone to be a DS and a dictionary; it would be incredibly poor on Apple's part if they weren't trying to make a dent in the DS market (Learning tools for Japanese children and students of Japanese) and the electronic dictionary market.

Thoughts?

I doubt it, at least at first. The OS X pop-up dictionary relies on text selection, which doesn't exist in the mobile OS yet; and the dictionary app hasn't been ported to the iPhone, otherwise they'd have mentioned it. I sure wish the iPhone and Touch had it, though.

I imagine someone might make some sort of third-party app based on the EDICT dictionary, but frankly, that dictionary isn't really that well-organized compared to some of the commercial dictionaries available.

 

[halpin]

I doubt it, at least at first. The OS X pop-up dictionary relies on text selection, which doesn't exist in the mobile OS yet; and the dictionary app hasn't been ported to the iPhone, otherwise they'd have mentioned it. I sure wish the iPhone and Touch had it, though.

Actually, a dictionary app is mentioned in this patent. Apple could even sell it through the App store - How much does an electronic dictionary cost... It would be bliss to have this as part of one's iPod/iPhone.