Japanese Keyboards

Yesterday I was at a meeting and got the opportunity to use a laptop with a Japanese keyboard. At first, it looks like a regular US keyboard until you take a closer look and realize extra keys are added at the expense of the space bar. The laptop I was using also had a smaller "SHIFT" key on the right side. I was trying to type in a password to a website and kept hitting the wrong key while I was aiming for the right-shift key. Eventually I had to stop trying to touch type and just look at the keys.

It wasn't until I started learning Japanese that I realized there are three different character sets for the Japanese language and all of them are used together. That means you can have all three in a single sentence. I understand the basic principles of how to use a Japanese keyboard, but am not an expert. It helps that most Japanese words can be "Romanized" or converted to Roman characters (those are the characters in the English alphabet). Then conversion software coverts the Roman syllables to the correct Japanese characters.

I am impressed that the Japanese have figured out how to adapt keyboards to their complex character sets. I'm glad I don't have to try and figure it out though as my fingers have the US keyboard pretty well memorized. I say my fingers have the keyboard memorized because if you ask me, I have to think really hard where specific keys are but my fingers jump right to them. Now if I could only figure out how to teach my fingers to spell.