Ryan's Blog

I was sending a message from my cell phone the other day and I started thinking about predictive text, the system that makes typing on a keypad tolerable. Without it we’d have to make do with multi-tap—the default setup on many phones—where you just press keys repeatedly until the letter you need shows up. To write “c”, you just press the 2-key three times, cycling through the available letters. Writing “See you tonight” takes 31 keystrokes: 77773333 99966688 8666664444448.

Predictive text works by matching numbers with likely words from a dictionary, and it substantially reduces the number of key presses necessary to type. If you want to write “hello”, you spell the word by pressing each key once. The system knows that “43556” only match up with “hello” and you save keystrokes. Now writing “See you tonight” only takes 15 keystrokes: 733 968 8664448. That’s a giant improvement (although it only gets us back to the efficiency of a real keyboard).

One of the consequences of this system is that occasionally there are multiple words that match a certain number combination. I’ve found two of the most problematic are 46, which is both “go” and “in,” and 43, which is “he” and “if.” When these conflicts arise, you just press a key to cycle through the matching words. As I cycled through words the other day I got to wondering what key combinations had the most overlapping words, so I threw together a little script. It ran through a dictionary file and converted all the entries to their predictive text equivalent and then tallied the results. Here are the top key combinations that match seven words or more.

1. 22737 (12 words) acres, bards, barer, bares, baser, bases, caper, capes, cards, carer, cares, cases
2. 72837 (10 words) pater, pates, paves, rater, rates, raver, raves, saver, saves, scuds
3. 2273 (8 words) acre, bard, bare, base, cape, card, care, case
4. 7867 (8 words) pump, puns, rump, runs, stop, sump, sums, suns
5. 74337 (8 words) rider, rides, riffs, sheds, sheep, sheer, sider, sides
6. 46637 (7 words) goods, goofs, homes, hones, hoods, hoofs, inner
7. 34637 (7 words) dimer, dimes, diner, dines, finds, finer, fines
8. 2877 (7 words) burp, burr, burs, cups, curs, cusp, cuss
9. 7627 (7 words) roar, robs, rocs, snap, soap, soar, sobs
10. 752837 (7 words) plates, skater, skates, slater, slates, slaver, slaves
11. 7337 (7 words) peep, peer, reds, refs, seep, seer, sees
12. 76737 (7 words) popes, pores, poser, poses, ropes, roses, sores
13. 4663 (7 words) gone, good, goof, home, hone, hood, hoof
14. 269 (7 words) any, bow, box, boy, cow, cox, coy
15. 24337 (7 words) aider, aides, bides, cheep, cheer, chefs, cider

The one major problem I’ve encountered with predictive text is when I try to write words that aren’t in the built-in dictionary. If I enter sister’s name, Erin, the best the phone can do is “Drin.” “Caitlin” ends up being “Baitlin,” and it’s a hassle to switch back to multi-tap mode and made the correction. One solution would be to add words to the build-in dictionary, but my phone doesn’t seem to have that option. As I was thinking about the best way to accomodate all the names you might want to write and I came up with a nifty idea that developers could implement easily: all the names found in your phonebook should be added automatically to the phone’s dictionary. That way the phone could reasonably predict any of your friends’ strange or unusual names. In short, adding a name to your phonebook would be like adding it to your predictive text dictionary.

It wouldn’t be an interface breakthrough, but it would be a nice stopgap until we all have iPhones.

Posted by Ryan at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish

by Joseph J. Keenan

Learning Spanish, like many subjects, is heavily affected by the teacher. Good teachers understand the material they teach; great teachers also remember what it was like not to understand. Good teachers know the destination; great teachers know the road, whether through their own experience or through years of observing students, and the pitfalls and stumbling blocks along the way. Without this, teachers are handicapped in helping students make their own transitions from confusion to eureka! Joseph Keenan remembers well what it was like not to understand Spanish, he knows the bumps on the road, and his book Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish is the work of a great teacher. It has been the most useful book I have had in speaking better Spanish.

Breaking Out is not a textbook. As the title suggests, it is directed at people who have already achieved some proficiency with the language. Instead, Keenan invites you into his classroom and picks up where textbooks and dictionaries leave off. Textbooks teach you how to conjugate verbs; in chapter five, “The Secret Life of Verbs,” Keenan explains when to use one tense instead of the other. His explanations, for example about when to use the preterit or imperfect, Spanish’s two past tenses, are better than any I have read in several textbooks. Spanish/English dictionaries exchange one word for another, but fluency often demands more than literal translation. Chapter seven, “Sixty-four verbs” gives nuanced definitions that illuminate more than a dictionary. Any dictionary will tell you that “think” is translated pensar, but you need a resource like this one to tell you that Spanish speakers prefer creer—to believe—where we Anglophones say “think.”

During the years I was living in South America I read through this book several times and I came away with new helpful tidbits each time. Once I started to use some of the phrases Keenan gives for linking phrases in conversation—like o sea, es que, la verdad es que, and others—I felt much more comfortable talking with people. And once I read these phrases in Keenan’s book and had them in mind, I started to hear native Spanish-speakers say them all the time, which is a vote for their authenticity. There are also invaluable chapters on how not to sound like a gringo, on tricky cognate words, and how to use (or at least recognize) profanity. The chapter on the subjunctive mood, an aspect of Spanish that always bedevils students, is appropriately titled “The Twilight Zone,” and it goes a long way towards explaining the subjunctive conceptually.

If I had to find fault with this gem, I’d say that the designer who assembled it wasn’t up to the task. The cover is hideous and the typesetting is mediocre. Apart from that, everyone who is learning Spanish should spent some time with this book. It might not do much for people who are still at a elementary level, but even advanced speakers will take away some useful tidbits from Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish.

Posted by Ryan at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)