> The paper: > http://psych.utoronto.ca/~muter/Abs1985.htm > suggests that for intermittent readers of unknown > orthographies, ideographs have much lower error rates than > alphabetic characters.
Without having looked at the paper......this sounds plausible but I would think that it depends immensely on the particular ideographs involved. Some of the more complex Chinese/Japanese characters are extremely hard to tell apart (and confuse native readers too). What about a script like Hangul which is alphabetic but works in a sort of ideographic way too (in that the letters are combined in blocks)? (Yes the Koreans use Chinese too but Hangul was designed for ease of use and to free people from having to use the Chinese set) > Should Japanese developers use Kana rather than Katakana (the phonetic > alphabet), if only to make life easier for us westerners? > There is some > research showing faster access to semantics for Kana, > although Katakana > is quicker to speak. There are characters in Katakana that are very ambiguous (at least to inexperienced readers) so it has its problems too. Hiragana is probably easier to read though. (And of course Japanese is odd in that some words can only be written in Kana rather than Kanji whikst all Kanji can be written in kana if you see what I mean) L. - Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe discuss To join the announcements list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe announce To receive a help file, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] help This list is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ If you have any problems or questions, please mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
