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Software Reviews
Blue Note magazine
Review of Japanese word processing program
Japanese software for native English speakers has advanced rapidly over the past several years. English-language Microsoft Office now offers easy entry and editing of Japanese text. A wonderful Japanese word processing application that has the great advantage of being free is JWPce, which is by no means limited to the Windows CE platform. I enjoy following the evolution of Japanese software for native English speakers, and I occasionally write about developments in the field. I wrote this review of KanjiWORD several years ago.
KanjiWORD for Windows (1992)
Whenever I tell people that I use my computer for writing Japanese, the first response I usually get is "Isn't that really hard to do, since Japanese has thousands of characters?" The answer to that question -- and the essence of a good Japanese word-processing program like KanjiWORD -- lies in the Software's front-end processor (FEP). That's the part that takes the out-loud reading of the text you want (which is easy to tap out on an ordinary keyboard -- lots of ka's, ko's, ju's, etc.) and puts it into written Japanese. The problem is that for each sound there are many kanji, or characters; for example, ki can be written with more than 80 kanji. So, in a worse-case scenario, you input ki and then hit your spacebar 80 times or so, cycling through all the characters that can be read ki as they pop up on your screen, until you can select the right one.
Let's say, however, you want to write a word that has two or more sounds -- say, kisha, comprising a character read ki and a character read sha. Well, that makes life a lot easier. There may be only five words that are read this way (which would still be a lot of "homonyms" in English, but not at all uncommon in Japanese). After inputting kisha in Roman letters, you would want to select the word you need from among the five two-character sets that the FEP supplies. However, what if your FEP can come up with only four of the possible combinations, leaving out the one character set you want? Then, you have to look up ki and sha independently, which, as we've seen, can be a time consuming operation. A good FEP should thus be able to supply all of the possible words for a given reading of a compound, when you ask it to.
Rather than input-and-convert word by word, however, it is much faster and easier if your program can handle whole phrases and sentences in one gulp -- ie, you enter the entire out-loud reading in Roman letters, hit a key, and there's the Japanese you want. This is where a top FEP really gets to show its stuff. One word processor used in Japan is famous for being able to come up with "kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha shita" in a single shot. The four kisha mean (a) your company, (b) reporter, (c) train, and (d) return. The full sentence means "your company's reporter returned by train." Here, the FEP has dissected the syntax and meaning of the sentence, and put into Japanese the four kishas, written with characters, as well as the "word-relationship" and "tense" components of the sentence, written not in kanji but in the Japanese syllabary known as hiragana. If there happened to be any Western-language-derived words in the sentence, the FEP would have to be able to detect those, as well, and put them in the syllabary called katakana. (I hope this entire discussion has been useful, but it's undeniably simplistic, and thus my apologies to Japanese scholars.)
KanjiWORD's FEP can't quite handle the four-kisha sentence, but it is far better than that of the Japanese WP program I previously used, and it suits my own needs fine. (Frankly, my own Japanese remains sadly ungrammatical, so there would be something desperately wrong if it could figure out everything I was writing.) Reviews of the program that I have read indicate that even native speakers find KanjiWORD's FEP relatively robust. Remember, though, that KanjiWORD is not a program for learning Japanese -- those fluent in the language will use it best, although it's certainly accessible to intermediate students. I found the documentation so-so. I didn't have much problem learning KanjiWORD, but important information required for importing files from other Japanese WP programs was left out. As you might expect, KanjiWORD's word-processing features are not as strong as those of, say, WordPerfect -- for example, there's no Undo command. On the other hand, I am using a full range of TrueType fonts (inputting English, of course, is no problem), and important formatting features (like borders and shading) are available. The program's 50,000-word English-Japanese dictionary is, very good, even containing some fairly obscure words, like eleemosynary.
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