>speaking of texting... in watching various TV shows and anime one could get surprised at the speed at which folks can message from a cellphone using the numeric keypad. One thing that I did notice however -- though the written language of Japanese is much more complex than English, the predictive input mode using only numeric keypad is easier to use for Japanese than English. Ironically part of it is because of the greater number of glyphs utilized. The other part appears to be connected to the "hodge-podge" nature of English language that makes rule-based entry more problematic (i.e. there are more exceptions to rules than there are rules).

There's only a couple of rules, and they're fairly easy:

1) all rules have exceptions except this one

2) we don't need no rules, we have lists.