Japanese Character Input Mistakes

July 31, 2006 on 12:45 am | In Language | | Email This Post

As many of you probably already know, when typing Japanese on a keyboard, it works something like this.

- Enter the Romanization of the Japanese word you want to type. Example: kimono
- If you’re in a Japanese input mode, by default your keyboard will change kimono to the proper Hiragana, in this case, きもの。
- Then after that you hit the space bar, and that will cycle you through all of the Kanji (Chinese Characters) that are pronounced kimono. In this case, 着物 is the first that pops up after hitting space once, and it is the most commonly used character for the pronunciation kimono. So, we hit the enter key, and we’re done.

However, if you continue pushing the space bar for kimono, you can get other Kanji possibilities which are all pronounced “kimono”, but don’t necessarily mean the kimono you wear…

着物、きもの、肝の、胆の、期もの、機もの、基もの。
Seems there are a lot of internal organs in this list…

This action of changing the characters from roomaji to hiragana to katakana or kanji is called HENKAN (変換）。

So, this brings us to the main topic… 誤変換 (gohenkan).

GOHENKAN is literally, mistaken henkan. For example if you meant to write SANKA as in, attend 参加, but you accidentally write SANKA 酸化 as in… oxidization… How embarrassing.

There are much more interesting GOHENKAN examples than this…

Anyone language geeks out there got any to share?

- Harvey

PS.  undrentide has submitted some excellent examples of GOHENKAN.

Check it out! Thanks undrentide!

http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~anono/gogo/gogo0.html
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~BX7S-YMMK/gohenkan.htm
http://www.kanken.or.jp/henkan/happyou.html
http://www.dik.co.jp/seken/JIMIHEN.html

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3 Comments »

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  1. Gravatar

    Did anyone notice the long DOWNTIME my site had for the past about… 5 hours?

    It was totally due to mistake of my own.

    Remember those COMMENT errors that you aw recently? That is a real issue. My ISP is looking at it. The DB gets corrupt or something. They run a REPAIR command and it fixes it.

    But thinking I could help things out better, I went in and tinkered with the DB… and changed the password… without changing the setting in WP. So it couldn’t connect anymore. Whoops.

    Comment by Harvey — July 31, 2006 #

  2. Gravatar

    誤変換 really is an issue sometimes (especially when I’m typing e-mail messages on business) but also a source of great fun.

    This article reminds me of a TV ad by Just System several years ago, about their IME “ATOK”. 入れたてのお茶 (freshly brewed tea) is a correct henkan but most IME worked it out 入れた手のお茶 (dipping-a-hand tea) at that time. A girl in kimono in the ad was trying to brew a cup of Japanese tea, then the wrong henkan is shown and she dipped her hand in the hot tea, saying “ouch!” It was really funny.

    My favourite is 昔、あるところに障子着物がありました (once upon a time, there were shouji/paper screen and kimono) which should have read 昔、あるところに正直者がありました (once upon a time, there was an honest person) though it is not really a 誤変換 by IME but a person - I read it in an old book by なだいなだ - it’s a mistake made by his wife from France.

    There are many lists of funny 誤変換 on the net, following are just a few of them. I hope you’ll njoy them! :)
    http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~anono/gogo/gogo0.html
    http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~BX7S-YMMK/gohenkan.htm
    http://www.kanken.or.jp/henkan/happyou.html
    http://www.dik.co.jp/seken/JIMIHEN.html

    Comment by undrentide — August 1, 2006 #

  3. Gravatar

    Thanks undrentide! These links are so good I’m going to edit the original post to put them in. This is just what I was tying to get at!

    Good stuff!

    Comment by harvey — August 1, 2006 #

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