Keith Devens .com

That's really awesome. Now I know what to decorate my dorm room with.

I don't see why you find it so hard to understand: you do it every day.

We might use alphabets, ours having at least 35 distinct glyphs (A and a are distinct, C and c are not), but that still doesn't mean that you still aren't drowning in ideographs: consider the icons on your desktop (especially the more stylised ones), symbols on crossing signs, your CD player's buttons, traffic signs, &c. The list goes on and on.

Just because they're not part of our everyday writing system doesn't mean they're not part of our character repetoire. And don't forget that when we're reading, we rarely comprehend words based on their component letters, but instead on their shapes, making them, quite literally, logographs.

Now, data entry on computers and typewriters is a bit different. I believe the systems used are modal for Hanzi and Kanji. For kana, a regular-style keyboard could be used, it'd just have a lot of keys.

The way Hangul is written is quite cool. It's an alphabet, so you could use a normal keyboard for typing. However, seeing as the letters are grouped into syllable blocks, the computer needs to modify the blocks you see on the screen on the fly. It looks nifty.

BTW, Logographic might be a better word if its the likes of Chinese you're thinking of. If you're thinking of kana or cherokee, syllabary is the best word.