I would contend the pronunciation would be more like “te-chou”. There’s no extra ‘t’ in there, just a short first syllable. Google translate translates the word as ‘notebook’ and I’d often be more inclined to believe that that a direct translation of each kanji separately. When you put them together they become entirely new words.
手帳
てちょう
手:te 帳:chō
(1) notebook; memo pad (2) certificate (3) identification card
Also: really?
I’ve been using the Office Depot “Stellar” notebook since early this summer, it’s my current favorite daily notebook. It’s a spiral notebook with tough plastic covers and, notably, a nylon cover over the spiral. The nylon cover prevents the typical bending and distortion of the spiral that eventually makes typical spiral notebooks unusable. I’m using the 3 subject 6"x9" version. I write in my monthly calendar on one page, my daily diary/journal in another section and assign other functions to other sections. The included plastic post-it flags let me mark my pages and there are many pockets to tuck other papers into. I’m loving it a lot right now and have just started my second one.
All of this said I see the appeal of this little planner, it’s got a lot of good design touches, some of which I’m mirroring manually on the plain lined paper in mine, and I do love graph paper. I’m tempted.
Here are three things as to why this planner going global is a big deal:
This is the same guy, Shigesato Itoi, who created the beloved Mother/EarthBound video game series.
An ardent English-speaking EarthBound fan who knows her Japanese AND knows about the Hobonichi Planner was the one who helped Itoi-san create this global version.
This gives the likes of Moleskine a run for their money. I, personally, cannot wait to have a copy of the Hobonichi Planner for myself.
Entering Japanese text electronically is more time consuming than typing the roman alphabet.
Ah, no. That’s absolutely not true. Let’s use the word 手帳 as an example. In english it’s 8 keystrokes [N-O-T-E-B-O-O-K] in japanese it’s 6 [T-E-C-H-O-space]. If you’ve got specific keyboards (which you can download many of on android) it’s possibly less.
I can see the value of writing things down when it’s for personal use. I still write grocery lists by hand. But I remember the old days of weekly meetings that persisted for years whether or not they were needed because there was so hard to change dates or times. Events had to be scheduled weeks and months in advance because there was no easy way to see who was available at a given date and time. Shared calendars have had a huge positive effect on productivity in large organizations, If you’re on you’re own, whatever works for you is fine.
Entering Chinese text or Japanese kanji electronically may be more time consuming than typing roman, but the syllabic alphabet systems (hiragana or katakana) aren’t particularly more complex to type than roman, and each character generally represents a consonant and a vowel.
My experience with English-language typing systems on portable electronics was that the Psion 3a (which was a bit too large to really call pocket-sized) was wonderfully designed and I could two-thumb type fast enough on its qwerty keyboard to copy voicemail in real time. The Palm Pilot wasn’t quite fast enough for that, even though I was pretty good at its Graffiti input system. 9-character T9 prediction is really annoying and slower, Android predictive qwerty on touchscreens is also annoying and usually slower.
Taking notes on graph paper? Really nice for some things, but you can’t grep dead trees, and it doesn’t sync with my Outlook calendar or phone calendar, and the notes aren’t available on my laptop, so it’s much less useful. There are pen-based input systems which let you capture your writing electronically while writing with either a special pen or ink over a special tablet, and if they could OCR my handwriting they’d be useful. Maybe Evernote and its competitors that let you do things like take a smartphone-camera picture of a page and upload it to a server that OCRs them and emails them back could make them useful.
Your example of one word certainly is shorter. However, you’re assuming that you hit the right homonym on the first [space]. Imagine having to look up the homonyms several times each sentence. Yes, I know that the dictionaries are getting smarter to anticipate the right word from context, but it’s still time consuming.
If this weren’t the case, then the empirical evidence would show much much more Japanese, Chinese, and Korean text on the Internet compared to Roman-based languages (per population), books would be shorter (they’re not), and East Asian note taking would be much less time consuming (it’s not).
Again I have to disagree. It’s only in the cases of extremely technical business or engineering language that I’d agree with you because in other situations I feel that Japanese sentences are more efficient than english in that they don’t have to spell every last detail out like we do in english. There also aren’t very many homonyms that make sense in most contexts… you’re usually only selecting from a few, the most likely of which is at the top.
Then you’re throwing Chinese and Korean into the mix… not really sure what those languages have to do with anything since the topic at hand is Japanese. Japan is a technologically advanced nation which has had decades of tech development over China or Korea, especially in the fields of video gaming and personal computing wher text input is vital. Japan was also a world leader in awesome smartphones and recently took the record for most tweets per second ever, which would suggest it’s actually easier to write in than english. Books are shorter, generally speaking, so I don’t know where you got that from. My Japanese version of catcher in the rye is much thinner and smaller than my english version.
Perhaps you are also familiar first hand with the Salaryman life? I’m sure enjoying it!
<cough>
Actually though, there have been good handheld OCR devices here for ages. Since handwritten Japanese follows a predefined stroke order its actually easier to do handwriting recognition in Japanese than English.
[quote=“Dave_Jenkins, post:11, topic:9326”] 1. Entering Japanese text electronically is more time consuming than typing the roman alphabet. As such, smart phone/tablet note taking is still underdeveloped.[/quote]There is a new phenomenon in Japan - entire novels being written on mobile phones during commute. Some of those are very popular and people read them on their mobile phones during commute ;-).
We had discussion about that some time ago on Mobileread discussion forum and somebody was explaining that there is very clever system for entering kanji on a mobile phone that makes very heavy use of predicting algorithms, so to write down the same thing the user presses fewer keystrokes than [s]he would when writting in English. As you start to type a list of characters is offered depending on context and you can select one of those relatively early.
I do agree with the rest of your post.
Agreed, regarding the quotes. I am a huge notebook nerd, and like nothing better than procrastinating on my real work by comparing new organizational systems against the one I already have. (Oh PlannerPad, you seductive thing.) But the quotes are a disincentive.
Fewer keystrokes doesn’t necessarily mean faster though. My smartphone has the predictive text thing and while I could save myself some keystrokes by using it I almost never do because it breaks the flow of typing and requires me to evaluate choices in realtime instead of just typing directly from brain to fingers.
Very interesting use of the word “new” here.
I absolutely love electronic/shared grocery lists, but the problem is I can’t get other people to use them so basically all I have is a list I can rearrange (although categorization does help save me so much trouble and time).
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