I'm a Japanese lit major. I currently have two teachers. One really cool but a bit nieve. When she asked why I wanted to be a Japanese lit major I said "Because The games are awesome, the cartoons are cool, and Japanese girls are gorgeous" She thought it was cute.
The other teacher, however is not very fond of my reasoning (possably becase she knows I'm telling the truth and not saying that to be "cute") I was recently humbled by her when I made the remark that Japanese text input into a computer was a pain because there were three differnt text standards (Jis, EUC, and iso-2990-jp) I added that after the language reform in 1969 that trimmed the characters from over 50,000 to 1,945 there was no need for such extreame fontsets and Unicode should be fine.
The reply made me have a whole appriciation for Japanese sarcasm.
"Did you know", she said, "that 90% of all keyboards are manufactured in Asia? How would you like it if we started removing keys from it. I mean, after all 'c' and 's' make almost the same sound. Oh, so do 'n' and 'm' so we'll just combine those as well. 'i' and 'j' look so much the same, we'll just drop one."
"Did you know", she added, "That when epson made an 8-pin printer in the 1980s was so they could print hiragana and katakana in one pass? It had absolutly nothing to do with making better looking "A"s and "B"s.
"And as far as Unicode goes. DO you know when the committe came up with that 'standard' they invited everyone execpt for China, Korea, and Japan? How would you feel of you had a bunch of countries trying to tell you how to code your own language."
oops, noever brough that up again