Bizarre Simplified Chinese Font

I love to, believe me, demonstrate that, but that would almost certainly violate copyright law.

Yes, I have screenshot of an example that shows it, along with other examples. I sent them to Rosetta Stone, along with screenshots from "Pages" where I wrote them in the correct font, thereby demonstrating that my particular iPad has been successfully switched to use the Chinese-style font.

A couple of related thoughts popped into mind last night, just for whatever it's worth:

The going theory for how Rosetta Stone got the Japanese-styled (i.e., wrong) font on their Chinese-language iPad Rosetta-Course app, seems to be that they included the font - unfortunately, the wrong font - with that app. The two thoughts that popped into mind:

First, including a font with the app is probably the right idea, in the sense that the app has to draw the characters correctly regardless of which font the iPad itself is setup to use. That is, the app has to draw the characters according to the font of interest regardless of which font is first on that particular iPad's font "search list" (in essence). Again though, the problem is that they included the wrong font with that particular app.

Second, perhaps the reason why they included the wrong font is analogous with the reason why iOS devices by default use the Japanese-styled font: Specifically, perhaps the iPad app itself is generic to studying just any-ol'-language, and what it displays is strictly based upon what it gets from the Rosetta Stone company's on-line databases. That is, the iPad app, I'm speculating, just draws whatever Rosetta Stone's on-line-course servers tell it to - be it Spanish, German, Turkish, Chinese, French, Japanese, Swedish, Korean, Hindi, or whatever - and it only has the one "Asian" font, which unfortunately for those studying Chinese, is all-wrong for Chinese-language study, but is exactly correct for Japanese-langauge study.

Yes, the iPad app only works only over the Internet, and you need to be subscribed to their on-line service to use it. Also, the app is clearly too small to contain the course itself, so...

I also find it puzzling that their QC folks didn't complain about this. The only thing I can guess is ... well, what I aluded to earlier: that it appears from the chat group that 2/3 to 3/4 of the Chinese-course students are "wimping out" :-) and just learning Pinyin, and probably an even smaller percentage still of the ones who *are* studying 汉字 use the iPad app. Obviously I don't know for sure, but maybe they're just banking that hardly anybody would notice, or even care if they do notice. The Rosetta Stone Chinese course doesn't attempt to teach correct writing of 汉字; they just don't emphasize that much compared to teaching vocabulary and pronunciation, for example.

RS has a chat group, and a web page for submitting bug reports. In the case of the chat group, that's how I discovered that most of the students are just doing Pinyin. I've tried twice to file a bug-report on this. The first time, the responder didn't understand what I was trying to explain, and concluded that the "bizarre Simplified font" I was talking about must be Traditional 汉字, so s/he pointed me to the way to choose between the two, which of course I already knew how to do. The second time, I think I made that distiction sufficiently clearly, but I'm not sure whether the report ever made it to anybody who would understand the concern...

So far I've found only one other person who is studying Simplified, and has tried out the iPad app. I told him about having to set the screen language to Simplified and then back to English, in order to put the Chinese-shaped font first on the font search list. He did so, and then fired up the iPad app, and confirmed that he too is seeing the Japanese-styled characters on the iPad app (I was beginning to wonder! :-)).

I gather, however, that he doesn't expect to use the iPad app much; he just doesn't need it for the circumstances under which he does his studying. On the other hand, I use it a lot, like over lunch at work, on the vanpool van to and from work, while I'm exercising on my elliptical machine (pretty challenging to hit exactly the correct spots on the screen!), or just relaxing on the couch (rather than the computer room) at home.