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Great, now what the fuck is Bemba?

The one application that I would like to see on linux is
Chinese handwriting recognition

(there are plenty for windows and a few for mac for example see worldlanguage.com but NONE for linux)

There are keyboard input methods that works under linux, and i use emacs for keyboard entry, which is a partial solution for me but not perfect.

obviously i would prefer to see some software like this under gpl but i am prepared to pay for a commercial offering

i think that such software would have the potential to greatly enhance linux uptake in China as well (think aunt tilly in china)

Not entirely certain on software, but as far as books go The Arabic Alphabet by Awde and Samano got me reading and writing in a jiff! An excellent resource is Audio Forum who sell the kits that the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) uses to train its diplomats. I believe Saudi Arabic is one of the few courses that the FSI has released the material on CD-Rom. Other dialects, such as Iraqi and Palestinian (to name a couple) are also available. But Saudi, far as I know is almost the lingua franca of the middle-east. Could be off base on that point though. But the FSI courses (whether on prehisoric blech *tape* or CDs) have proven extremely useful. Pricey, in some cases. But thorough and useful. Some folks have spoken highly of Transparent Language, at the very least you might find some web links there. The Center for Applied Linguistics might also be of help to you. The The Pimsleur Method is pretty smokin' IMO. Flash cards are EXTREMELY useful to have/make yourse'f - well nigh indespensible in learning the written form of the language IMO. And finally, there are some I've known who've praised the "Talk Now!" approach.

Not entirely certain on software, but as far as books go The Arabic Alphabet by Awde and Samano got me reading and writing in a jiff! An excellent resource is Audio Forum who sell the kits that the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) uses to train its diplomats. I believe Saudi Arabic is one of the few courses that the FSI has released the material on CD-Rom. Other dialects, such as Iraqi and Palestinian (to name a couple) are also available. But Saudi, far as I know is almost the lingua franca of the middle-east. Could be off base on that point though. But the FSI courses (whether on prehisoric blech *tape* or CDs) have proven extremely useful. Pricey, in some cases. But thorough and useful. Some folks have spoken highly of Transparent Language, at the very least you might find some web links there. The Center for Applied Linguistics might also be of help to you. The The Pimsleur Method is pretty smokin' IMO. Flash cards are EXTREMELY useful to have/make yourse'f - well nigh indespensible in learning the written form of the language IMO. And finally, there are some I've known who've praised the "Talk Now!" approach.

You claim that all humans should be able to read a random hostname. What about an average grandmother who happens to only read Chinese? She can't read cnn.com, and that's about as simple as possible when it comes to domain names. Your scheme has already failed.

Ahem. She can look at a printout for cnn.com, look down at her keyboard, which has letters "C" "N" "O" "M" plainly printed on them, do some pattern-matching, and punch it in.

Or did you not know that well more than 99% of computer keyboards are based on English ASCII? Regardless of whether someone is typing in Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, or Korean, they've all got a slight variant of an IBM 101 keyboard under their hands. Those 1% that don't are using some software inputs, and that software has an easily accessible panel to pick out the 37 critical ascii characters.

I got a lot of upmods for that post. And I got a lot of negative responses for people who evidently either didn't read it completely (and don't understand that resisting the internationalization of DNS in no way prevents use of native-charset website names), or don't know that English is the international language of technology, and that the 37 char ASCII set is the easiest possible alphabet for all people to learn.

ASCII37 is a subset of the alphabets of 50% of the people on earth. Of those not using it natively, the majority of their computer-using population can already recognize ASCII37. And compared with any other candidate alphabet system, ASCII37 is usually much simpler or at worst equal in abstract difficulty. The combination of it being a small, easy system, and already being the most commonly understood in the world makes ASCII37 the indisputable choice for universal human readability.

This is a good program is designed specifically to teach Arabic-speakers Japanese Too bad it's $179.

Yea, but you did a whole hell of a lot better than this site...

At the described affair brøt Jon Lech Johansen kopibeskyttelsen at DVD - the movies and generated her and other access at combining at DVD - disk's in unprotected admonish. Admittance stayed baseless as a matter of DVD - the movies stayed sold along with assumption about that the user do be about consumes authorized avspillingsutstyr and abide by kopibeskyttelsen. Appropriation at the movies in unprotected admonish has rape breakdown as a matter of the licensees no longer has protect against baseless diffusion at the movies.

At least I hope you did better... otherwise the judge has his work cut out for him. Either that or Mr. Johansen is in big big trouble.

-S

There are tablets like this one where you draw the character and an appropriate double-byte character appears at the cursor.

Here is the original web page as auto-translated to English

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