From: rap@news (Ross Paterson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: pinyin reform
Date: 22 Dec 1992 11:17:31 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
Reply-To: rap@doc.ic.ac.uk
NNTP-Posting-Host: peaberry.doc.ic.ac.uk

From article <75849@apple.apple.COM>, by lai@Apple.COM (Ed Lai):
> In article <1h4hn5INNmhn@frigate.doc.ic.ac.uk> rap@doc.ic.ac.uk writes:
>>From article <1h3u3kINNpms@iskut.ucs.ubc.ca>, by lug@oak.ppc.ubc.ca (Guoqiano Lu):
>>> You may not  believe that a well trained Han Zi typing person can beat
>>> an English counterpart.
>>
>>That is surprising, given that a typist trained for an alphabetic writing
>>system need not lift his or her eyes from the text being copied, and can
>>type faster than speech, and much faster than handwriting.
>>
>>What input method for hanzi was used?  Where does this study appear?
> With a two stroke input method (where most of the frequently used
> characters are encoded with two letters), then it takes two keystrokes
> to enter a Chinese character. Chinese phrase is usually two characters
> and that is a total of four keystrokes. Assume this is equivalent to
> an English word which is about 5 letters long, then typing Chinese
> should be faster than English. IBM Japan has done experiments to
> confirm this.

I once attended a talk by an IBM fellow who was associated with this
work, which I believe began with a series of experiments by Yamada in the
early 70's.  The crucial point was that the association between pairs of
keystrokes and characters had no discernable pattern.  They found that
working out which keys to strike from some association with the shape
or sound of the character slowed the typist down considerably.  I, like
most people I expect, found it incredible that typists should be able
to memorize 36x36 = 1296, or more, such arbitrary associations, but the
experiments showed that it was feasible, and Yamada even worked out the
best way to teach the table.  This was the fastest method ever developed
for Japanese (kanji + kana), but the Japanese government stopped funding
Yamada's work.  The work of Yamada and IBM in this area have produced
no popular product; it seems there is considerable resistance to the idea.

I don't know how it compared with typing the Japanese in kana without a
conversion to kanji -- Ed Lai's argument would seem to imply that Yamada's
method was faster.  Of course, it's not for novices.  Nowadays phonetic
input methods, with the conversion to kanji happening at the end of a
sentence, are all the rage.  I also suspect that 1296 characters doesn't
get you as far in Chinese as in Japanese.

> It should be pointed out using ShuangPin (where the consonant is
> encoded by one letter and the vowel by another) without tone and
> in phrase input is equivalent to two stroke input method.

Not quite, as the mapping isn't arbitrary -- when typing from copy, the
typist has to use a different part of the brain to convert from the shape
of the character to the sound, and this is slower.  Of course this doesn't
apply for typing from speech or one's own thoughts.  Also, the typist has
to look from the copy to the screen at the end of each phrase or sentence,
to check that the program has selected the correct conversion to hanzi.
Phonetic phrase input methods (like Ed Lai's own excellent method) have a
gentle learning curve, and give weak typists like me much the same speed
as with alphabetic writing, but this wouldn't hold for a trained typist.

This is another, longer term, issue.  People who use phonetic input
methods to input characters also tend to forget how to write the
characters, though they can still recognize them: they are still
doing lots of reading, but little writing.  (This is the experience
with Japanese phonetic input methods: the handwriting of people who use
such methods all day goes down the drain, and they are always looking up
characters they have forgotten how to write.)  In fact, such typists are
being trained in the alphabetic representation of Chinese.  So perhaps
such input methods are an insidious threat to the future of hanzi.
--
Ross Paterson <rap@doc.ic.ac.uk>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7