Japanese How do the Japanese type?

theres a few dozen characters each in Hiragana and Katakana and thousands in Kanji. How do they type? I'm pretty sure its NOT with a gigantic keyboard, so what goes on? Special programming for the keyboard or what?

 

i think (well this is how chinese is) there is a special keyboard.
and next to every letter there is a, how should i say it?
um...
a symbol.
and most chinese words are made up of 1 to 4 symbols. and i think if they type it, the program they have merges them together and makes it into a word.
i THINK.
and, yeah, about half the chinese words are also in the japnese ones, and mean the same thing, so thats half your question answered.

 

My computer can type in Japanese it's cool I guess. All I have to do is type romaji basicly. Then if I want hiragana, or katagana I go to a little box that pops out to pick which one I want to use and hit the space bar to turn it into kanji and pick the charicters. It's hard to explain but really easy to do. I've never tried typing on a computer made in Japan so I don't know how they work, but it's probably slightly easier than my way of typing Japanese. And I have seen there key board they have the alphabet and hiragana on the keys, and the rest is the same. So it has I think the same number of keys. Hope that helps

 

If it's anything like the Japanese IME (Input Method Editor) that Microsoft bundles with the IE service pack, it shouldn't be that hard. First, I believe that Japanese keyboards are kana keyboards (the keys have hiragana and/or katakana on them). Kana is syllabic, so there isn't much more/less kana than there are letters in the English alphabet. Also, the characters in hiragana have corresponding characters in katakana (hiragana is used for Japanese words, katakana for foreign words, like American words), so they could go on the same keys.

Now, if it's like my IME, it's similar to what members have posted before me. They can type words in hiragana, and if they've chosen an option in a menu, it'll combine it into the most likely kanji. If that kanji is not the one they want, they can change it to the correct kanji from a drop-down list. It would probably take slightly longer than typing in English, but then writing in Japanese takes slightly longer anyway, from what I've noticed (roommates are taking Japanese classes).

So no, no huge keyboards. Just keyboards with kana.

 

*nods* yup, everyone's right about the IME, but there are actually JWPs that have keyboards with kana on them. For JWPs, each key represents a kana (like a letter) and you just type to make that kana.

i'm probably not making any sense huh? ^^;; er...like on the keyboard Q would be "‚_h@A would be "‚¢h etc..and if you shift+ the key, you'd get a katakana 'kana'. ^^;; I'll try and find a picture to better explain it.

 

That's what I said, keyboards with kana and word processors that work like the IME.