Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Kei Furuuchi <kfur@example.com>]

John De Hoog writes:
 > Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > > well, as some other people pointed out, you can't get rid of Kanji and
 > > > still have an intelligible Japanese, really.  I think what needs to happen
 > > 
 > > Don't buy that still. When i learned Japanese it was written all
 > > alphabetical and I had no trouble understanding that. Am I
 > > smarter than other people ? Sure not....
 > 
 > If you stay with basic stuff, it works OK. As soon as you start getting
 > more deeply into the language, and find out that there are many words
 > with the same pronunciation but written with different kanji having different
 > nuances, you will realize (well, most sensitive people will realize)
 > that to force Japanese into the alphabet is to strike a deep blow at the
 > heart of the Japanese culture. Is that what you want to do?
 > 
 > Anyway, you are trying to repeat history, perhaps because you are
 > ignorant of the experiment tried by the American occupation forces after
 > the war. They took groups of students and gave them all-romaji
 > textbooks. After a while, the academic performance of the romaji
 > students fell behind that of their kanji-studying counterparts. Then
 > they took a random selection of ordinary citizens and tested their
 > understanding of kanji. To their surprise, they showed a very high level
 > of literacy. The experiment was dropped from that moment.
 > 
 > This discussion is not unrelated to computers, or even to Unix. When
 > people start telling a culture to shape itself after computers rather
 > than sticking to their richest traditions, their priorities are entirely
 > screwed up. Rather than telling people to adjust to computers, you must
 > make computers adjust to people. That goes for the language processing
 > systems as well. Let the Japanese and Chinese use kanji, but build
 > better systems for handling these languages. (And I don't mean Unicode.)
 > 
 > --
 > John De Hoog, Tokyo
 > dehoog@example.com
 > http://dehoog.org

The topic comes up again as it did this June. I would like repeat my
position by stating "earth girls are easy" translation.
But, again this is not to say it is superior or even alternative.
What I would like to say is there is nothing special in Kanji to describe
Japanese especially in computer.  
I proposed to make direct connection between kanji and english word
semantically. When translating "earthgirls are easy" it is "earthgirls
wa yasashii." But, what does it mean by yasashii. Does it mean 優しい
or 易しい? So Japanese needs to supplemnet means by using Kanji. So I say
use easy instead of 易しい and still make it sound same. It becomes
"earthgirls wa easy-shii." But it sounds same.
It may easy to use in computer and poeple with alphabetical language
to learn Japanese more easily in computer.

Also alphabetical language is easy to read in computer because the
words are longer horizontally. Japanese sure looks pretty when it is
used in sports news paper. But not in computer because lengths are
same in length and width. It is cumbersome and tiresome to read. 

So I would like to propose another thing: 
Hangul is alphabetical system that looks like Kanji. So why not flat
it out when it is used in computer.
For example, kim in President Kim spell like this in Hangul.

K I
 M 

So it could be flatted out KIM. I don't know how hangul keyboard is
used to input.

Regards,
Kei.

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