Comment by WalterBright
13 hours ago
I don't want tunes. I want a voice. It is not any harder to learn 3 Japanese words than 3 random tunes. You don't have to learn Japanese. It's 3 words.
It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
Many Japanese appliances actually do speak, but you'd probably have a hard time troubleshooting them.
One day the normal sounds you're used to don't happen, and instead you hear "Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu." So you try to find a manual to understand what it means, and the manual has a Japanese section ("給紙トレイで紙が詰まっています。") and an English section ("The paper loader is jammed."). How do you know that the sound you heard ("Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu") means "The paper loader is jammed" unless you already read and speak Japanese? One way to figure it out would be... icons.
My point was the speech should say "jam" (in Japanese) and it will be better than a beep and an the text "jam" (in Japanese) is better than an icon.
My old truck had a lever that had 3 positions: COOL HEAT DEFROST. Modern cars have all these idiotic icons and I can never figure out how to defrost.
Defrost is the little window icon with wavy lines on it. Same icon it's been since I started driving 25 years ago. According to the internet, it's been that way for 50 years, since it was standardized by ISO 2575-3:1975 ("Road vehicles — Symbols for controls, indicators and tell-tales"). Both US and European law decided in 1978 that everyone had to use the same icons.
And there's a user manual in the car, you know; RTFM?