In response to Ewok, Jewelray originally wrote "You know it's a bit outdated when it has ワープロ and ソビエト for vocab..." to which you replied
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ewok
ワープロ still gets some use in Japan, mainly among the older crowd and those who see computers as those untamed evil beasts, that they type things into and it prints it out.
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I mistook you both to mean that the term ワープロ was outdated. However I see that Jewelray meant that it's much more common and no longer need be included as special vocabulary to learn (I think?)
As for kanji, it'll be interesting to see how Japan copes with the future (China as well). Western language-based technology is largely responsible for bringing some weaknesses of the picture system to light. I can remember asking a Japanese teaching assistant of mine how many kanji he knew, back when I was just starting to learn kanji. He said that he knew around 2,000, but he could only remember how to write perhaps 300 of them. I'm not sure how long he'd been in America, but it couldn't have been more than four or five years, if that.
One of my friends studied abroad in Japan last semester. She was with some Japanese friends and forgot how a certain kanji character looked. So she asked one of her friends to write it for her, and, as she told it, he couldn't remember. Instead, he whipped out his cellphone, input the phonetics, scrolled through the kanji until he reached the right one (recognition is easier than recollection, in my opinion), and then showed it to her. College student.
Perhaps in the past, when writing by hand was performed more regularly, keeping the characters fresh in one's mind was much simpler. But now, with computer-based input, we're all pretty much working off of recognition of characters. It really weakens our ability to write it later. What happens when you can only write in your language through a computer? Maybe nothing, but it's certainly an interesting thought.