Name: 為什麼你可以用日語發更多的微博？什麼才算一個字？ (Why You Can Tweet More In Japanese: What Counts As A Character?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:14:56.000Z
Duration: 2 min 31 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

基礎被動語態

Twitter was set up to support 140 characters.
And in the English alphabet, that's easy to

understand: a character is a letter, number,
space or punctuation mark. People more or

情態副詞

less agree with computers there. And if it
was twenty years ago, that's exactly how the

Mind you, it's still fairly straightforward
in some languages. East Asian languages, for

example - Chinese, Japanese, Korean -- "one
character" is a glyph, a number, a space,

or a punctuation mark. But since the language
is denser -- each of these characters encodes

more information than an English character
-- you can fit almost twice as much information

Take Arabic, for example. What counts as an
Arabic letter? First of all, the shape of

Arabic letters change significantly depending
on where they are in a word. Watch what happens

as I take the Arabic for "Arabic alphabet",
and hit backspace. Arabic's right to left,

remember. The characters change in order to
be consistent with the rules of the written

language, and the diacritics disappear separately
to the letters they're next to.

In Vietnamese, on the other hand? Each of
those counts as one character.

It's at this point that most British programmers,
myself included, throw up their hands in defeat

and just use existing code by some other generous
soul who's already worked the problem out.

Or if they're lazy, they just say, well, no-one's
going to use this who doesn't speak English,

Hmm. Unicode has a single character for some
English ligatures, like "ffi" - notice how

the letters there are smushed together to
make them look better to the eye. Some programs

will automatically add those in for you. So
you copy and paste your text from that into

Twitter, and suddenly you're saving characters.

People would count that as three characters.
Unicode, and therefore Twitter, and pretty

much every computer program? Just one. The
greatest example of this I could find is the

Arabic for "peace be upon him". Unicode has
a single character for this, and Twitter will

treat it as counting for just 1 of your 140.
Which is handy, if you're a devout Muslim

and want to talk about the prophets on Twitter.

So. What counts as a character? Well, it's
complicated. Computers see things differently

to people. And let's be honest: unless you
have a professor who's setting their essays

by character count instead of word count the
only time it'll really matter for most people...

[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]