>As an American, it's very strange to consider a youth being unaccustomed to a PC keyboard.
Well, not all households have a PC/PCs in their household. if
their parents' jobs aren't office work then they are less likely
to be familiar with PC and don't own a PC in their home. It's
kind of like a digital devide in Japan.
Even in such families, kids there wants to have their own cell
phone to be connected with their friends all the time, so
their parents buy a cell phone for their kids. That way, even if
a kid can't type PC keyboard well, they are very skilled in
typing on a cell phone keypad.
Students have a chance to get familiar with PC at school but
schools PC literacy education is defferent from school to school
so, some students don't acquire good typing skill because of
the lack of time they can spend on typing on PC key board.
So they are better at typing on their cell phone keypad.
As the webiste you put a link to says, some students and even
adults are kind of like addicted to cell phone use.
My 15-year-old nephew's cell phone has been taken away by her
mother=my sister, because her mom found out that when she was
supposed to study in her room, in fact, she was sending e-mails
for hours at night during the entire period of school's test
week. Her grades were terrible and her mom has taken it away.
There seems to be a unique cell phone use culture among
youngsters in Japan. There's a rule among them what's called
30 minutes rule in which if you don't reply to your friends'
e-mail in 30 minutes, the recepient think they are ignored
and disliked and the friendship go bad. Some call it 3 minutes
rule, not 30 minuites. Kids have to be on alert.
Bullying on the Internet is a social problem here and some schools banned students cell phone use. This is a sign that it's common for students in Japan to use Internet on their cell phones.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20081221a1.html
http://wirelesswatch.jp/
This website gives you the cell phone trend in Japan.
http://www.wirelesswatch.jp/docs/JMIR_Sample.pdf
This ecerpt of a PDF document sold by the company that runs the website above gives you what's going on in Japan's cell phone
internet use. You can learn a lot from it, although data there
is until 2006 or 2007.
I'm not what's called a digital native and don't use a cell
phone for email and web browsing so, reading the PDF file and
the website gives me better undersatanding of cell phone
Internet trend. I can practice reading English, too.
By the way, the website you put the lingk to is English-
learners-friendly in that they provide the scripts of audios,
too. If I couldn't catch some words, I can check the script.
I think I'll listen and read other articles on the website.
>>422
Oh, stupid me. orz Thanks.