A question for the computer geniuses

[TaintedB]

Actually, you can type Katakana and Hiragana easily enough using phoenetic translation with an english keyboard, but kanji is much trickier, since there are often five different kanji characters that all have the same pronunciation and two different meaning each.....
Kanji is better done with a special program, our school uses Kanji word (which actually also does Hiragana and Katakana)

Someday I may want to pick your brains about all of the above. You ever see what the translation programs do to Japanese? It's ugly. Say the words in the Japanese language paragraph are the cards in a deck, arranged in a precise order. The translation software takes that deck and plays 51 card pickup with it. :/ Nifty (website-based translator) seems better than most of them at sentence parsing but even it chokes out nonsense once in every ten sentences or so.

 

[TaintedB]

Thanks for giving it a shot though.
le sigh

You tried posting this in the How To Forum for weird harold to answer? If anybody would know a viable workaround for this it'd be him, I would think.

A very awkward workaround is to create your html or word doc with all the special characters in place and then put it in your post as an attachment, much as many of us attach pictures. May have to zip it up if the forum software doesn't allow doc or html extensions.

 

[snowy ciara]

Actually, you can type Katakana and Hiragana easily enough using phoenetic translation with an english keyboard, but kanji is much trickier, since there are often five different kanji characters that all have the same pronunciation and two different meaning each.....
Kanji is better done with a special program, our school uses Kanji word (which actually also does Hiragana and Katakana)

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I don't care to have a computer do the work for me until I've proven to my satisfaction that I can do it myself. I'm taking Japanese at Uni, I'm midway through the first semester. I *need* to learn the Kanji and the Hirigana and the Katakana FIRST, before I allow a computer to do it for me. That's why when I'm studying on the computer with people in an IM I'll spell it phonetically as we are taught to do in class. When I'm doing homework, I handwrite it. I don't cheat with a computer. That's why I'm not really worried about a translation program yet. Eventually, yes, as my studies get more advanced I will want one. But until I can do it reasonably well myself, it's worthless to me, because I won't use it. Japanese is an incredibly complicated language and it does take years of study to get to a reasonably facile point when it comes to reading and writing in Kanji, but I won't allow myself to take the easy way out.

Does this make a stubborn bitch? You betcha. But it's not worth doing unless I can do it well. To allow myself to do it the lazy way is counter-productive and personally unacceptable to me.

Some one take this damn soapbox away from me! I'm spending waaaaaaaay too much time up here lately!

 

[snowy ciara]

You tried posting this in the How To Forum for weird harold to answer? If anybody would know a viable workaround for this it'd be him, I would think.

Not yet, but I will.

 

[Aeroil]

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I don't care to have a computer do the work for me until I've proven to my satisfaction that I can do it myself. I'm taking Japanese at Uni, I'm midway through the first semester. I *need* to learn the Kanji and the Hirigana and the Katakana FIRST, before I allow a computer to do it for me. That's why when I'm studying on the computer with people in an IM I'll spell it phonetically as we are taught to do in class. When I'm doing homework, I handwrite it. I don't cheat with a computer. That's why I'm not really worried about a translation program yet. Eventually, yes, as my studies get more advanced I will want one. But until I can do it reasonably well myself, it's worthless to me, because I won't use it. Japanese is an incredibly complicated language and it does take years of study to get to a reasonably facile point when it comes to reading and writing in Kanji, but I won't allow myself to take the easy way out.

Does this make a stubborn bitch? You betcha. But it's not worth doing unless I can do it well. To allow myself to do it the lazy way is counter-productive and personally unacceptable to me.

Some one take this damn soapbox away from me! I'm spending waaaaaaaay too much time up here lately!

Lol, I never used any computer translation software for anything other than translating japanese websites (usually for hentai) otherwise I did occasionally use a japanese-english dictionary, and checked our textbooks a lot.

I know all 104 Katakana and Hiragana now, with possibly a few being a bit blurry, and quite a few Kanji.

I can count up to 99,999 too . Just I'll stumble a bit as we get up higher lol.

 

[snowy ciara]

Hmmm.. new aeroil torment. Making him count the flogger strokes in Japanese and making him start ALL OVER again if he messes up....

 

[Aeroil]

Hmmm.. new aeroil torment. Making him count the flogger strokes in Japanese and making him start ALL OVER again if he messes up....

Lol, Mistress doesn't know japanese, so how would she know? .


.........Oh wait, I'd tell her....... damn my honesty........

 

[snowy ciara]

What's her email?

 

[Aeroil]

What's her email?

*goes into administrator mode*
It is not within my power to divulge that information, but if you'd like, I can file a report with the Mistress in order to possibly get permission to forward that information privately with you, if you'd like to try and get that information made public here via a post on the forums, I could certainly file a request for you, but as it is against policy, I'm afraid it would be a rather moot request.
Now, if you'd like me to forward your idea directly to her, that is well within my power.

 

[snowy ciara]

I didn't ask for it to be made public... My PM box works.

 

[Aeroil]

I didn't ask for it to be made public... My PM box works.

Lol, in case you can't tell Ciara, I was kidding......
then again by posting this I've probably missed something myself.

 

[FungiUg]

So why is it doing this and more importantly, how do I fix it?

It's all to do with code pages and character sets... sadly, most web sites use an 8-bit character encoding form, whereas XP (and MacOS X and most Unixii) now use Unicode, which is 16-bits. Suffice to say that in 8-bits, many glyphs cannot be encoded.