Oh, I give up! Give me words! Real words! They’re so much easier. 🍑 as much as I want to 🏃 from these cartoons, I ⛔️.They are rapidly seeping into the vernacular of the 🌐. It’s a ⚓️ or 🏊️ situation.
I get 📧 now with little characters in the subject line. My text messages and social media feeds are increasingly 🌝 of 😃-only sentences or thoughts. Instagram, specifically, says nearly nearly 4️⃣ 0️⃣ % of the text posts on its apps contain emojis. Domino’s even lets you order a pie now via tweet with just a 🍕.
Emoji is the new lingua franca. and like learning any new language, brain power, practice and tricks are required—especially for an idiom that has 💩 and 👻 but no equal sign.
Unfortunately, there is no 🌹 💎 for emoji yet, so this week I took it upon myself to create my own 😃 🏫 and become a better emoji-unicator.
Understand the Language
My first 📶 was understanding that 😃 is unlike any other language out there. Yes, a small character can be a substitute for a word, or many words—similar to Chinese. But taken together, the language lacks the grammar, vocabulary, syntax and semantics of a true language.
The result can be complete and utter ambiguity, which is why most are confused by a string of characters sewn together. Take, for instance, this coupling 🚗 🏠️ .
“So… a car and a house. Easy!” Yes, that’s obviously the literal translation. But it could also mean “I am going home.” Or it could mean “I left the car at home.” Or it could even mean a “car’s house,” aka “garage”—since there isn’t a dedicated character for that.
But emojis have a “useful ambiguity,” says Mark Davis, the president and co-founder of Unicode, the group charged with defining the characters for all 📱 💻️ —including emoji characters. He believes they are best used as an “adjunct” to text—especially in social media—helping to make up for the the lack of gestures, facial expressions and intonation found in speech.
“ 😃 😎 💪 💃 📱 ⌛️ 📏 🔗 📖 ➕ 🍲 😋 🔵 🌻 😂 " Dr. Davis said.
He thought I was a bit 🌰 🌰 🌰 for even attempting to write the first part of this article strictly in 😃 .
But even to just supplement text with emoji, you need to adjust your brain to think visually: how to communicate in cartoon.
For me, that meant replacing certain quick responses and feelings with some basic characters. A 👍️ is an easy way to say “Sounds good!” I can convey my bad mood about having to work on Sunday with just a 😡 or my excitement for my sister’s landing a new job with not one 😍 but 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 .
When I started to embrace that, I felt in some peculiar way that my text messages had more emotion. In switching from ☎️ and 👫 communications to primarily 📄 , we have lost out on the feelings that can only be conveyed in inflection and 😊 😝 😂 😣 😭 😥 😩 😮 .
Learn the Vocabulary
Getting a handle on just how and when I should start using emojis instead of words was the easy part, figuring out how to actually 🔎 the emojis to help me express myself was much harder.
The best 💬 I got came from Jonas Downey, a self-proclaimed expert emoji communicator and co-creator of Emojisaurus.com, a website that provides emoji translations of popular phrases.
“ 😮 1️⃣ 0️⃣ 0️⃣ ❓️ 😬 💡 📝 💯,” Mr. Downey told me. “Making emoji phrases is like writing sentences in English—you get better when you know the whole vocabulary.”
So I took his 💬 : I sat down with the iOS emoji keyboard, and got to 📚️ . Why hadn’t I been using 💪 to tell people I was at the gym? Or 👉️ 🍷 to ask people out for drinks? Or 🚽 to say, well, you know?
The trouble is that the characters that would best express ourselves aren’t always there. One reason is that emoji comes from 🎌. (In Japanese, emoji means “picture character.”) By my count, 5️⃣ % of the nearly 9️⃣ 0️⃣ 0️⃣ emojis available to 📱 users aren't going to be useful to many people in the U.S., like 🏮 and 🔰 .
That also means many potentially useful characters are missing. While there are 🐥 🐣 🐔 🐤 🐓 , there is still no single emoji for 🔥 🐶 .
We are now starting to see an expansion of the emoji language, including some very American characters. Microsoft has just added 🖕 to its keyboard in Windows 10. (It isn’t available for Android or iOS). And both Microsoft and Apple now support 🖖. (You know, “Live long and prosper.”) In the years to come, we can expect more and more 🇺🇸 😃 .
Learn on Apps
With a better understanding of the new vocabulary at my ☝️ , I was ready to put it into use. But this is where our 📱 are failing us.
The 😃 keyboards on iPhone or Android 📱 are utterly disorganized and unfamiliar. Yes, they will automatically add your most used 😃 to one pane, but even if you get the hang of where some are located, you’re stuck swiping through pages of little cartoons.
I also fell in ❤️ with Keymoji. Although it also doesn’t have the multiracial option, it suggests emoji as you type in regular text, right on top of the keyboard. And it doesn’t just suggest regular emojis. For instance, when I typed “long time no see” it suggested 📏 ⏰ 🙈 . Some emoji elitists may say this sort of thing is cheating, but I won’t tell anyone!
However, on a whole, Android users lack quality emoji characters and apps. The best I found for my needs was SwiftKey (also available on iOS). The popular keyboard app auto-suggests some emojis as you type, for instance 🍕 , 🍟 , 🍩 , but it isn’t as advanced as Keymoji. And none can make up for the fact that Google still hasn’t brought different skin tones and its human emojis look like the Minions from "Despicable Me."
This ➕ another layer of confusion to communicating in emoji. Because the software platform creators control the visual representation, an emoji sent by an iPhone user to an Android phone user will 👀 different—in some cases, really different. Take my beloved 💃 . Red dress. Great moves. She can be used for many expressions from “social” to “party.” On Android, it’s :android_dancer: . Yes, a yellow blob with a rose in its mouth. Send that to someone, and the 🌹 🔫 .
A few Android apps promise to ease the pain and translate Android emoji to iOS. The best one I found was Sliding Emoji Keyboard iOS, though it is slightly less convenient to switch to a dedicated emoji keyboard in Android than in iOS.
That brings us to my most important emoji learning of all:
😜 👍️ 😃 ❗️ 🎂 🍣 ⚾️ 👍️ 😃 ❗️ 💞 💗 💖 👍️ 😃 ❗️
Playful chitchat, literal conversation and sentiment all benefit from these little characters.
🍑 😐️ 💬 ➡️ 📧 ♏️ ⚽️ ☔️ 📍 🆓.
But serious communication should stay emoji free.
Submitted July 01, 2020 at 10:12PM by MbIfYouStannedLoona https://ift.tt/3iwCoRc
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