I’ve recently started learning Japanese using Genki. I plan to create Anki decks of the vocabulary and was wondering whether I should type these using a Romaji keyboard or a Kana keyboard.
As an English speaker, I know that it’s not ideal to think in terms of Romaji and that I should be getting familiar with just the Kana. Is there any detriment to using a Romaji keyboard that converts it to Kana as you type? Or should I attempt to use a Kana keyboard?
3 comments
if you mean on a laptop, just use a standard keyboard
if you mean on a phone, i find different keyboards to be helpful at different times, but the one i use the most is the google handwriting keyboard, which allows me to *draw* the kana and kanji, it’s good practice
I think the key part about all of this is if you actually think about what you are typing. What I mean by that is that is this: how much of a distraction is typing in romaji and using IME to convert it to kana vs how much of a distraction is typing using a keyboard you aren’t familiar with. For me, though I do try to use a JIS keyboard and type using kana here and there, it’s so much harder for me that I spend a significant amount of effort trying to remember and find characters on the keyboard instead of on the information I’m trying to learn. To me, learning to use a JIS keyboard is a completely separate skill from learning the language. As such, if I use romaji and IME then I don’t normally have to think about how I’m creating the characters because I am just used to typing and it frees me up more for learning.
For phone keyboards though I don’t find it as difficult because it’s laid out so logically that it doesn’t really take brain power to use it… at least not comparatively.
Romaji on physical keyboard, 12-key kana on phone