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Linux Handwriting Recognition
Dark Paladin writes "Cnn.com is reporting that Communication Intelligence Corp. and Middlesoft is working on Linux based handwriting software that will work in handhelds, Internet appliances, and have GTK and QT hooks. Now we can move from carpal-tunnel to writers cramp. " Now I'm curious, what matters more to people, handwriting or voice recognition?
What is this doing here? It never appeared on the main page even.
But, all-in-all, this is pretty cool. Maybe we'll finally see Palm-style Open Souce handhelds.
And, if you're wondering, an open souce handheld would be great. Why settle for what Palm (or Microsoft) thinks is good for you when you can write your own look and feel?! Just think, you could probably add compatibility for both Palm apps and Wince apps. Now all we need is some good touchscreen support, and we're set! (Or is there already touchscreen support I don't know about?)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
How would you install Linux on a ROM based product?
The other reason why handwriting is better than voice recognition, despite the possible and immediate use in handhelds, is that we seem to be fairly saturated with voice technologies, but nobody has created a decent OCR package. (Unless, of course, SANE has done it and I haven't noticed.) Getting--not *just OCR*--but handwritintg recognition, is something to be pushed. Hearing about the US post office using stuff for sorting is one thing; it's totally another to have advanced stuff on your own machine.
ultimatly, i think that voice recognition will become commonplace, but that there will always be a place for a good hand written letter. but will anyone be able to tell the difference? Theres a big difference between dictated tone (ie what you say) and what you want to be written. A letter usually sounds different when you read it than when you are spoken to by that person. not only will voice recognition software need to become more accurate... but it'll also need to have some kind of filter to 'formalize' dictations. I think :)
Why are we writing 'writing recognition' software? I thought the whole reason for using computers (typing) was because they were faster... ;p
I type 120 wpm, I write like 5. Just my thoughts on Christmas morning
*3rd post*
as far as my information goes:
i will opensourced. there will be sources for the SDK and a flash player
see the link, they will be pretty strong in the hand held market soon.
well, that cassiopeia from casio might be kinda nifty with kde and handwriting software. my friend said he tried one that had linux loaded onto it.. handwriting recognition would be helluva better than trying to dictate while in a crowded room or on the bus..
Anyway, I think handwriting recognition is definitely appropriate for handheld computer applications, while Voice recognition will evolve into regular applications.
Just out of curiosity, How long will it be before everyone forgets how to write?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Voice and handwriting req
Well, to me it would be which is the most efficient. I know I can certainly type faster than I can write, so I would choose typing over handwriting.
Voice recognition would me much more usefull in situations where the hands are needed to control delicate things that only the trained motor skills of a human could do the job (fighter pilot, surgeon) to control things such as providing the right tool or weapons control.
So I would rank the three options in this order:
1. Voice
2. Typing
3. Handwriting
However I have left one option out, thought control (You know what I mean). The reason I left this out is because I think it is such a long way of. Sure we can train rats to think about pulling levers, but it is a long way before we can create machines that could understand the brain patters. It must be even more complex than voice recognition...
-- "If you don't break it how can you learn how to fix it?" GU/E d->d-- s-:-- a--- C+++ L+ N++ w++>++++$ PS+ Y+(
Voice and natural language are great tools for communicating directly with other people. Computers are not people. Voice and natural language may not be an efficient / effective way of communicating with software elements in a computer.
It would be nice to see this kind of software in linux...
There are a fair number of projects out there. Heck, I even designed a HR system and implemented in VB in 1/2 an hour (after 3 weeks of design work). That was when I thought I had money to buy a uCsimm with and build my own handheld. Since the handheld didn't happen, I left the prototype where it stands, but if anyone wants the system, they are welcome to it. (email me, and I will describe my method and send you the code.)... Anyhow, I think linux is ideal in many way for handhelds, because it can (and has) been implemented on mmuless systems, it's efficient (which is good for small microprocessors, and you can still get lots of full fledged software for it. Keep up the good work everyone.
More Caffeine. NOW
I never understood what all the fuss about those penn-based computers was. My normal handwriting is so incredibly garbled that i'm about the only one who's able to read it. In contrast, i can type extremely fast. When i'm able to, i type. It's that those notebook keyboards are too loud to take to university, but if i could i would take one with me too to avoid writing. For OCR purposes it would probably come in handy, and maybe for signature recognition on all sorts of transaction devices, but for me a computer reacting to handwriting or voice control would be a step back. (Can you imagine somebody sitting behind his desk, just finished his masterpiece, and somebody pops up behind him yelling "format slash why enter yes!!"?) Maybe not realistic, but it's got a point to it. Typing is fast, secure and error-proof. Maybe i'm looking at it from the perspective of a techie, but voice and handwriting recognition adds another layer between the user and the computer instead of removing one.
BOTH human-machine interfaces matter for handhelds.
For most of the present users of unix, the machines are large and in charge, and have keyboards. So voice is a larger market for TODAY. (handwriting -> keyboard -> voice in order of ease)
And, as voice can exist on handhelds (when handhelds become powerful enough), people will use the voice interface over writing. (because writing is more work than talking)
Voice on handhelds exists as demo-software. The Newton 2000 had voice software from Dragon Systems. (20 or so words)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
While handwriting recognition often gets a lot of gee whiz value, I think I'd find truly resilient voice dictation to be more useful. The reason is that the technology applies to more situations. When one considers how much one communicates verbally (well, those of us that haven't locked ourselves into our cellars with our beloved machines), compared to how much people handwrite - the advantages are clear.
/almost/ every situation where one would wish to write. While the two would certainely be complementary - I think voice stands best alone. For instance, PDAs could be made very effectively using only voice dictation. The reason this hasn't been done is prohibitive hardware costs to wield such processing power in a restricted space / weight / power. This *will* be overcome, though perhaps gradually.
/exceed/ most people's typing speeds - handwriting can NEVER do this. Therefore I would say that many forms of typing will be outdated (though for many applications the additional precision is desirable). I cannot see this happening with handwriting.
Aditionally:
1) A *noise resistant* voice dictation technology would apply to
2) It is readily apparent that in the desktop situation (ie non-portable) a voice technology is FAR *FAR* faster than a handwriting system. As voice improves it will
So from my standpoint it seems that Voice Dictation addresses a true "holy grail" of computing accessibility and ease, whereas handwriting recognition fufills a few important niche markets. This would be a tough choice to make except that voice recognition also performs suitably well in 90% of the aforementioned niches.
As much as I have enjoyed handwriting recognition (I'm a happy newton owner), I would trade it in a second for a really slick and accurate voice interface.
-nullity-
I guess voice rec. is more of the order here. I can type faster than I write and everyone can read it. So why bother. Maby for palm thing, but... if it had voice rec... no need for writing rec.
- handwriting is a one-handed activity
freeing your other hand to hold a handheld, the telephone, etc.For a desktop, I actually like having everthing in parallel. Touchscreen, mouse, trackball, stylus, trackpoint nubbin, and glidepad. I've never had them all at once, but I've had many of the combinations and they're all useful at times throughout the day. If my hands are on the keyboard, I don't want to take them off, but if I'm standing, talking to someone, on the phone, or my workspace is cluttered, I like to reach for more convenient or demonstrative devices.
This is not as far off as you think. There are companies with products on the market for paralysis victims that can do limited functions based off of thought patterns.
The Univ. of IL, Champaigne-Urbana was doing a lot of research into this area. I've seen programs on The Discovery Channel as well as in some (reputable) science journals.
Heck, there was a major article on this last month! (If I can find where I saw it, I'll post it.)
All this technology is pretty cool, but I think it will prove unpractival in time. I especially see talking to the computer as slowing things done. Sure, it's good in telephone systems and the likes where there are no good keyboard, but when it comes to the average desktop computer - it would only be a nuiceance. Even in the telephone appliances it can be boring, here in Sweden the railroad has speach recog. ticket orderings, which gets the most crazy ideas about where one would like to go.
...).
;-) ).
Antoher thing about speaking is that, when the user wants a written report or something about that, she / he would generally produce better material writing than speaking (which gives no time to think about things
Handwriting recognition should be more useful, but, as someone else said here, keyboard recognition is probably much faster (and uses fewer resources - plus the ability to backspace
// Simon Kågström. Enters his text keyboard-wise.
Humans can't read my writing, I imagine software would have a rough time too (and how would it handle all those crossed out words that I thoroughly messed up?). Plus I deplore actually putting pen to paper. With a keyboard people finally read what I have to say, after I fix the screw-ups(TM).
Merry Christmas and Thanks to All for an informative/entertaining year.
JM
Oink, Oink!!
There are several places where pre-set forms are used and filled out that could greatly benefite from handwriting recognition:
Police Reports/Tickets
Hospital/Doctor's Charts
Signature Recognition (With a pressure-sensative device a signature could be used as a unique encyption key. It's basically a manual "key" now to banks, UPS, etc.)
There are numerous applications that lend themselves to handwriting much better than voice (noisy environments; limited but various response questionnaires, etc.)
I think the best items will combine both (voice notes w/recognition).
Several WinCE PDAs have the ability to record voice notes (w/o recognition).
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What else did you expect from people who have
been typing for most of their lives... I write
at about 1/10 the speed that I can type.
is there any kind of shorthand that can reasonably
allow 100 words per minute?
A lot of you have forgotten. Newtons had really powerful hand writting recognition. May we could see about getting some of their code. A friend of mine uses a newton 2100 as a replacement for a laptop (Risc 117mhz) for checking his email. It has adapted to his handwriting pretty well. And its VERY fast.
just a thought
Years ago I installed OS/2 with VoiceType dictation. I was very excited about using my voice to control my computer. My wife was less excited. She all but threatened divorce. Its one thing to spend hours on the computer, but when I started talking to it... well that was too much for her.
After years of typing my handwriting has devolved so much I can't see handwriting recognition being any benefit to me.
Lets skip both and move forward with research on thought recognition. You wear a headband, hat, wrist strap, ring or something and you control your computer (or at least a pointer) with thought commands.
The goal is to have an imput device that you could use in public without looking or sounding like an idiot.
For a specialized wearable computer or robot, one that executes a limited set of commands, voice recognition is more beneficial as it does not require physical contact with the device. Both have their places, but for using Linux on a PDA, handwriting is more useful.
--
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
I've never used 'true' handwriting recognition, but having used a palm pilot (not a palm, i had an old usr palm pilot pro), I really liked graphiti.
I can write in graphitti much faster than I can in any legible script and it seems to me that in the present state of processors and power drain that it is much better to train users to learn the computer's script than it is to train computers to learn the user's script.
Other than that, I think this is good. Now if eventually I can get something like jot to work with my touchpad in X, that would be great.
The word is graffiti--spelled thus--which happens to be a plural whose singular is graffito.
You are missing the point. In many situations, you don't have a keyboard! This is particularly true with PDA's, but any compact, hand held device will have the same need. Many embedded devices would be easier to use with some sort of handwriting recognition.
If you are sitting in front of a computer, there is no doubt that the keyboard is a better input device, at least for most people, but computers are quickly growing out of the confined model of mouse, keyboard, CRT desktops that we have grown to know and love.
Think of of how we could use StarTrek style data pads.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
For English-speakers, voice recognition and OCR might seem like neat gimmicks, but they're going to be *vital* to bring information technology into places like rural China, where people are lucky to be literate in their own language, nevermind learning a foreign phonetic alphabet and awkward keyboard input methods.
Check out China's up-and-coming domestic computer maker Legend at http://www.legend-holdings.co m/eng/press_centre6.html... Their basic model includes a keyboard, but more centrally - a writing tablet.
I'm glad to see Linux-based voice and writing recognition efforts. Imagine this - Linux bringing the Internet to 1+ billion more people...
The only thing a handwriting input device buys me is the possibility of a smaller machine. Voice recognition, on the other hand, gives me computer input in contexts where my hands are busy - such as while driving. It also allows for an even smaller machine - since the input interface can be a pinhole rather than a surface at least the size of a Postit note. And I can usually speak faster than I can write.
But while voice recognition may strike me as more enabling than handwriting recognition, it's not an either-or issue. They each add a unique capability. Pick either one, and I'm sure there will be a number of applications where it's a better fit than any other input mode.
Handwriting recognition seems like the ideal input mode, for instance, for paper computers. Imagine a pad of Postits, each running PalmOS. B-)
Also: If they ever come up with a handwriting recognition program that can read my writing better than I can, I've got a lot of old notes around here that I wish I could read...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Lets look at the options:
.tif files of every document I wanted to scan. I'd move to completely electronic filing (except for those documents where someone/some government agency would want the original copy of something, of course), if only I could throw a search engine and editing capability around it. I'm a pack rat - I've never deleted a nontrivial personal email. But to try and do that with every important paper doc that crosses my path would be impossible without some better way of organizing/indexing them, and that means OCR.
Handwriting recognition:
Great, so far as it helps with OCR on handwritten pages. Not so great, as the primary interface to a handheld computer. As much as I prefer the Palm Pilot as a PDA, I'd much rather have a tiny, two-finger typeable keyboard than use graffiti (or the onscreen keyboard alternative). Graffiti just doesn't work as quickly for me and feels more awkward. And recognizing "natural" handwriting would be even worse. My handwriting goes from left to right; it doesn't stay within the sensory area on a PDA. The "unnatural" graffiti writing actually helps because it eliminates that instinct to move your hand while writing.
Voice recognition:
Sure, would have been great to dictate homework when I was in the 6th grade and didn't know how to type. But today it would have to get punctuation, spelling of homonyms, etc. exactly the way I wanted it to be marginally better than typing long paragraphs. And as for voice commands? Forget it. It's been like three years since I've had my computer situated out of hearing range of any other computer around, and I don't want to work within some wacky scheme to decide which computer is supposed to be listening to me.
OCR:
Now, this would be useful. I'd love to live a paperless life, but unfortunately I live within a society that doesn't see things my way. It would be nice for my "filing cabinet" to be completely electronic, but today that's not really a good option unless I save
I think the real issue is not whether one should come first or the other, but rather who is going to write the defining application. There are already a few voice recognition programs for linux: gvoice, kvoicecontrol, xvoice, FreeSpeech, and a few others. Handwriting recognition applications are a bit rarer, I'm sure. However, if its a commercial product, then does it really matter? Are we going to pay money for something we can get for free anyways?
Perhaps natural language may not be efficient for computer control. But that's a separate issue from voice recognition input.
We've been programming and controlling computers using UNnatural, contrived languages for a long time - and directing other machines, domestic animals, and human work teams ditto since long before comptuers - or even recorded history. Think about driving a horse - or a car, military command-and-control, coordinating a crew of sailors, or calling a football play.
Voice recognition technology give us a way to capture, lex, and parse vocal gestures. Whether we try to decode the vocal gestures as a natural or a contrived language is an issue that doesn't arise until the parser level.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I was just looking through the documentation for my wife's new Palm (and O'Reilly's book on getting the most out of it). It strikes me that it wouldn't work terribly well for languages other than those supported by iso-8859-1 (latin 1). That is an excellent default, but won't support my I18N work completely.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Handwriting, voice recognition, sign language recognition, face recognition, special keyboards all good.
Large & small screens, speech output, Braille, 3d all good.
Different devices, different users, different situations, different tasks call for software that can adapt it's interface.
There is no easy way for a programmer to take advantage of these different scenarios now, or easily write software that adapts to new environments.
This sort of thing could be done at the component level in a toolkit. It would be a book the mobile and disabled users. You could use the same software, and programmers could more easily write their software for several audiences.
Since IBM is another large pushing factor in Linux's promotion, it can later decide to port it's voice-recognition applications to the Linux platform. But the handwriting-recognition was an excellent step, and will allow more internet-appliances to pop up supporting handwriting recognition, running Linux, and allowing anyone with the proper knowledge to tweak the hell out of the machine!
Handwriting recognition of Chinese characters would be useful for Chinese users, because most people aren't willing to invest the time to learn one of the many Chinese input methods. It's much easier to write the character out than to press a sequence of keys which represent the component parts of the character...
Neither voice nor handwriting input would change much the `human-computer communication bottleneck'. Which is a very big bottleneck: while we receive very large amounts of information from the computer through our visual system, we talk back to it at (using a keyboard) only ~ 5 bits per second (much less than you got with even the very first modems!). [English text has around 1.5 bits per character, say there are on average 5 characters per word, and we type at 40 words per minute (for me only when typing gibberish)].
The answer I think is to sacrifice some small part of our primary visual cortex (the bit of the brain your little finger is over when you're sitting back with your hands behind your head) to interfacing with the computer. By surgically implanting an electrode chip with a radio transmitted that had just enough power to transmit through bone, and then letting it heal over so there was no risk of infection (which would happen if you had wires hanging out of your skull).
These electrodes would then be used to decode the nerve cell activity in a small patch of brain tissue. By visualising characters in that part of your visual field, you could communicate with the computer [the jury's still out on whether 'visual imagery' reaches all the way down to the primary visual cortex, but I hope it does].
The end result might be that we could have a unix command-line interface in a small strip in the lower part of our visual field, where we just visualise command-words. Of course, English is a pretty inefficient language for communicating in this way, so performance would be improved by operating with a specifically optimised alphabet (even Chinese would be much more efficient for this, you'd think).
-------------
ans =
NaN
At this point, voice recognition and speech dicatation have gotten good enough for certain narrow applications. Neither by itself is going to be accurate enough for general use because both technologies need to be targeted to a specific context and vocabulary to work well.
On the other hand, if you combine speech recognition with a system of gestures and written jottings for doing corrections on the fly and for "nudging" the interpretive engine in one direction or another, you can probably increase the speed at which fully-corrected speech or text gets input by several orders of magnitude. Such a system gets rid of the need for stopping dictation/writing to go into an "edit" mode.
Current products show a strange myopia--designs that do handwriting or speech recognition as though users are unable to do both at once, partly an outgrowth of these technologies' origins as accessibility tools. That is, while it's terrific that someone with no mobility can use ViaVoice to fully operate any software other than perhaps a raster imaging package, this approach has made these technologies more tedious and linear than they need to be.
Indeed, such a thing may not even need handwriting recognition to get most of the benefit. I'd love to see what could be done to speech dictation performance with a gesture interface implemented on a pen tablet.
I think a lot of people are correct, to make a good handheld handwriting is crucial, but more like Graffiti, and less like Newton HR. I've used ViaVoice and PlainTalk, and find voice recognition gimmicky, most people that would use such a product tend to type faster than they speak. I think voice is fantastic for differently-abled people that cannot interact with a keyboard, and maybe that would be a perfect purpose for voice on Linux.
Find it here in beta.
Even though it is still in beta, it is already being used as a foundation for things like GVoice.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Unlike many others, I can also type faster than I can talk. Frankly, I think speech input should never be an universal option as there are many people who have some sort of speech problem, foreign accent, or just plain mangle their language (just listen to any teenager :-).
handwriting is a one-handed activity
I can see a large market for hand-writing recognition among certain segments of the online population who use their computers for certain activities that use a certain other hand....
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Been There, Done That.
Come on folks!
Its called the Newton Message Pad 2100.
I don't know what Steve Jobs did with the technology, but these little honeys really did the job.
I don't see that handwriting recognition is going to help Linux in any way, most things Unixy are designed for the keyboard with a occasional mousing around. To really make efficent use of the technology you need a shell or operating system design to support it.
For references check out anything related to the Newton or for a good view of the damage Redmond has done to pen computing check out the book Start Up : A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan.
Handwriting recognition could be useful for languages with too many characters to feasibly put on a keyboard (such as Chinese), and for OCR'ing handwritten documents. As an input method for languages using a latin-based alphabet, it's pretty useless, for me at least. I can type much faster than I can write, and I think this is true for pretty much anybody with more than rudimentary typing skills. I'll stick with typing, thanks.
As for voice recognition, perhaps there are some limited uses, but I don't see this as being useful for me or most of the people I know either. I don't want to be talking at my computer - this would require either wanting everybody around to hear what I'm saying or being alone. I don't think it'd speed me up much either. I can type around 100-120 wpm, I doubt I can talk much more than 10% faster than this.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There's an Open Source Smalltalk called Squeak that is an astoundingly interesting platforms from a number of perspectives. Most relevant to this discussion, Squeak has an open source implementation of handwriting recognition, written by Alan Kay and inspired from a rather clever grafitti-like HWR, called GRAIL, from the 60's. I've seen GRAIL in and it's actually rather better than grafitti, which isn't bad in a very old piece of free software. Thus, you can use anything with a pen as a "PDA" if you can run Squeak on it. The recognizer is quite good, and the source code is easy to read.
Squeak runs on all sorts of OS's, including Linux. It doesn't need an OS - it's been ported to "bare metal". It's been ported to PDA's (like the Zaurus PDA), DEC Itsy, WinCE, and others, like DOS, BeOS, Windows, MacOS, OS/2, the Acorn, AmigaDOS... you get the idea.
So if anyone really wants an Open Source HWR for Linux, I'd suggest downloading Squeak and reading the (really short!) code for the recognizer.
> Just think, you could probably add compatibility for both Palm apps and Wince apps.
What makes you think that writing WinCE API is going to be any easier than writing the Win32 API, a project which WINE is working at for some years now.
I am positive that there is more then one aspect of the WinCE OS that is being done without documentation (I can tell this by simply looking at the things done, compared with what the documentation claims is possible).
Shachar
The whole point of me learning to touch type when I was 15 was because I hate handwriting! Why would I ever want to go backwards like that? I can write much faster on a keyboard than by hand. I can't handwrite as fast as I can think so I mess up and write the wrong letters and so on. No such problem with typing.
It doesn't make sense to come up with backwards technology. Give us something that is more efficient than a keyboard and we're talking. Voice input? I think I want something that doesn't make me look like a lunatic, it's bad enough to see those idiots in town just standing there and babbling into their hands-free, invisible mobile phones.
TA
I have not tried to compile the Sun stuff under Linux because I am a hardware guy, and if anything more than typing 'make' is required I get the shakes and start sweating. (Comes from years of being a Mac user, but I am getting help.)
I have a IBM Thinkpad 730T Tablet computer, and Debian Linux is the only OS on it. The pen works great thanks to a patch to X. All I need is HWR that is as good as my Newton MP2000, and I would have the ultimate Linux PDA.
Just want to add my vote strongly on the handwritting side. A few points:
* I think most people have low expectations for handwritting recognition because the most they are familiar with is Graffiti. Graffiti is bunk. It's a highly circumscribed gesture system. Special characters, one at a time, not 'in place' on the screen, no visible ink. There's some acceptable reasons that Palm chose it when they did, but real handwriting recognition is something else entirely. Expect it to read your writting with 99.9% ease and accuracy, and within a couple years we'll be there.
* HWR is not for desktops, it's for portable devices. Keyboards are easier for most everyone when they are practical. That said, there's at least one place where good HWR really excels, and that's with form based info. Sure you can tab between items with a keyboard easily enough, but there's nothing more intuitive than writing information _where it goes_. It's fluid.
* Voice recognition has its place, but it's also a drag. I remember reading an interview with Jeff Hawkins (Palm/Handsping) where he describes trying out handheld voice recognition by talking to a dummy handheld for a day. Drove him crazy. I think that goes for most people. Try it for 15 minutes yourself, especially with other people around. Now compare that to writing with a stylus. Our technologies should be graceful, not vulgar (I say). That's how I'd characterize the two. (To elaborate: yes, there is nothing more natural than speech. But talking is not a data input device, and if a friend ever spoke to me that way I'd probably hit them.)
The CIC news is great. Handhelds are probably _behind_ where you'd think they would be by now. I'm sure some Linux competition will get things moving again...
Tell that to my mother and the thousands of other secretaries who took dictation through the ages.
They listened to the author, wrote what they said in a phonetic shorthand in real-time, then went back to their desks and re-translated their shorthand to typed output.
The only reason they used that system was because they couldn't type as fast as the person talked, but they could write (shorthand) as fast as the person talked...
[
Don't know if this will appear where I want, apologies if it Doesn'y ( i'm a /. newbie ). Anyway, saw a Maclean's article saying some grotesque number like 40% ( unsure of that ) of Canadians would like an American Passport. I'm not sure why, I think it's atleast in part becasue we allow ourselves to have an inferiority complex to the americans, for no justifiable reason. There is nothing an American passport, aside from citizenship, gets you that a Canadian one doesn't. Canada needs to look more on itself, culture rules don't work, I'm not sure what does, but sokving a problem only works once you figure out what it is.
Actually, Korean isn't that bad since it does have an alphabet which maps fairly well onto an English keyboard (upper and lower case letters; 14 consonants + 21 vowels = 35 total letters which is less than 2*26 = 52). It only becomes a problem with hanja (Chinese characters), but they aren't used that much in modern Korean. For Chinese and Japanese you're right, though.
Cheers,
Philip
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.