Brush calligraphy of Chinese characters.
This is the most ancient, and one
of the very most beautiful forms of writing on Earth.
But the Chinese writing brush is very difficult to use,
and it's certainly not efficient enough
for the modern computer age.
I think of the Chinese writing brush
as a low-level of writing technology,
which long ago was replaced by the mechanical typewriter.
And recently, we've seen the mechanical typewriter replaced
by the word processing system, which is much more
convenient and easy to use.
OK, now let's type some Japanese.
As you know, Japanese also has some alphabets.
For example, the hiragana alphabet.
So when I press this hiragana key,
the alphabet shows up on the virtual keyboard.
I can go back to English.
I can go from hiragana to katakana, or back to hiragana.
So it's easy to type the kana characters directly.
For example, if I want to type [JAPANESE],,
I can type [JAPANESE],, and the kana characters
are typed directly.
But I learned to type English.
I would rather type on a Roman keyboard.
So I can use this pop-up command to set the keyboard mode.
We'll find that up here, I can now type in Roman letters.
And I will get a kana.
For example, if I type "S-I," it's changed to shi.
"N-D-A-S-I."
The computer automatically changes to kana.
So let's use this system now to type
this text, which is the text of the abstract from my paper.
The kana I can type directly.
"Koko dewa."
And when I come to a kanji, I type first it's sound, "fuji,"
"F-U-J-I."
Then I use my thumb to press this key,
and the system goes "beep."
It's found the kanji in the dictionary.
Now it only presents me the very most common word, "fuji."
If I want to see more, I press the key again.
And on the virtual keyboard, it shows me many other words,
"fuji."
I can type these using my hands because this virtual keyboard
is a picture of the keyboard.
For example, on this long key there's
the "fuji," which is the flower, so if I type that,
I can get the flower.
If I don't want that, or if I make a mistake,
I can press the undo key, and I get my choices again.
And I can see all the choices.
For example, here is Fuji the mountain.
That's the most common one.
So there's a heavy black box around it.
That means I can choose it with a special way using
my left thumb.
I can very easily pick the most common kanji.
So usually I type to pick the kanji with both thumbs.
It's very easy.
I don't have to move my hands.
Now since that word was not in the dictionary,
but I want to use that in my typing,
I'll use a special command for adding
an entry to the dictionary.
Says Add Dictionary Entry.
And it brings up a sheet that I just fill out.
[JAPANESE] When I type [JAPANESE],,
I will tell it the set of kanji should bring up.
So I can copy that in.
And then with one finger, I enter them
into the system dictionary.
So now the next time I type.
[JAPANESE],, it comes up immediately,
because now it's in the system dictionary permanently.
In this case, there are two different words, [JAPANESE],,
which we see at the top of the keyboard.
But this one-- suppose I only want to see the word important.
I don't like this word.
I'll never use it.
So I want to change the system so it only
gives me this choice.
Again there's, a simple one-finger command that says
this--
Change Display Position.
And all I do is press this option default.
And then the next time I type the same phrase, [JAPANESE],,
I only get the one alternative.
I want to show you one more feature which is interesting.
I can use the word--
for example, a simple word.
Yamada.
"Ya-ma-da."
When I type that, I get both the name Yamada,
and the simple word yama da.
But if I were only typing a name list,
maybe I don't want the ordinary Japanese word,
so I can change the list of dictionaries using,
again, a one-finger command called Set Active Dictionaries.
This command gives me a list of dictionaries where I can choose
where the words will come from.
So if I'm choosing a personal name list,
I will turn off the common Japanese dictionary,
and turn on the personal names just using one finger.
Now if I type the same expression, Yamada,
I immediately get only the personal name.
So I could use that if I were typing just a list of names,
a telephone list.
A Japanese person who knows how to type English
can learn to type Japanese on this system
in less than one minute.
I know, I've seen many people do it.
These are just a few of the software features of the Star
System.
There are many more that we don't have time to look at.
And some of the new software we're developing in the lab
may eventually allow us to replace
the ancient Chinese writing brush.