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Originally Posted by steven
Sending Japanese mail (on phones of course) is WAY faster for me than sending mail in English. For starters, English words tend to be comprised of more characters than Japanese words. Not only that, but you have to insert spaces into English sentences. PITA if you ask me. Every time I get mail in English that I know I have to return in English I dread it because I know it would take me a fraction of the time to send it in Japanese. In fact, if it's a subject that requires a bit of elaborating on, then I'll type it up on a computer and send it to my phone, and then send that on its way.
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I had to laugh as I feel exactly the same way and do the exact same thing. It is such an incredible pain to type English on a phone. My most recent one has a pretty advanced word recognition feature, but that only reduces the difficulty by about 5%. English just is not intuitive to send from a keypad. Character limitations are part of it, but I have to think that the sheer pain involved in typing English is at least half the reason people use so many abbreviations.
Japanese is just so much easier to input. You can actually just sort of say the word as you type it rather than thinking of spelling. I can never remember which letters go to which keys when typing in English as there is no distinctions between sets of letters in English like there is in Japanese.
For example; In Japanese, 1 = あ い う え お 2 = か き く け こ 3 = さ し す せ そ... And so on, following the 10 columns of the Japanese alphabet.
In English, 1 = punctuation 2 = ABC 3 = DEF and so on, with some numbers having 4 letters assigned. Spaces are a pain, but not as much as capitalization. That one is also an incredible pain. (I am not going to toss proper punctuation out the window just because I`m typing it on a phone, sorry.)
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There is a dark side to Japanese mail though-- some people (girls) can be really picky about the crap. Like if my wife sends mail to her friends and doesn't include enough "moving" smilies that are "current" then she'll hear about it later.
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You wife`s friends are... strange. That is junior-high / high school level stuff. I find it hard to imagine anyone over 25 ever mentioning something like that.
People will compliment you if you find and use a really cute / cool image in your message though.
ETA; A bit off subject, but the input on the phones made me remember something mildly interesting. How very strange Japanese people find the idea of a spelling bee. Words are read exactly as they are written (and vice versa), and the characters are "named" the exact sounds they make (there is no change in sound depending upon what comes before or after). The idea of standing up and "spelling" something is completely unthinkable as it simply isn`t possible in Japanese.