LLearn Japanese

Do most japanese people use kana or romaji input on desktop?

I know there is the 12keys for smartphones and japanese people prefer that to QWERTY romaji->kana conversion.

But on desktop there are keyboards that have hiragana on their keys alongside roman letters to use directly without conversion. Do most japanese people use one or the other or is there a split?

7 comments

  2. To supplement u/December18th2017’s response, here is an [article](https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana#:~:text=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%9B%BD%E6%B0%91%E3%81%AE%E3%81%8A%E3%82%88%E3%81%9D90,%E3%81%8C%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E3%81%AE%E3%81%A7%E3%81%97%E3%82%87%E3%81%86%E3%81%8B%E3%80%82) (it’s a few years old, but I don’t imagine the figures have changed *that* much) estimating that roughly 90% of Japanese use romaji input.

    As anecdotal evidence, I worked in-house at a Japanese company for over a decade and had many chances to observe my co-workers typing. Literally *one* person was a regular user of kana input, and — ironically — he was one of the absolute worst typists I have ever seen in my life. (I suspect he was told at one point that kana input was more “efficient” and decided to make the switch, but never practiced or was able to master it to the point that he wasn’t hunting and pecking at excruciatingly slow speeds.)

  3. Adding to the fun is the strong dividing line on how they use the input on their phones. There is a strong age dividers as people who learned on physical keypad phones use the repetitive tap, and those who learned on touch screens tend to use flick. (And there is even a tiny group that uses romaji on phones, since there were some qwerty physical keyboards.)

    When they have to switch phones, that change their styles, they are often as clumsy as foreigners at inputting text.

    But yeah to your actual question, you will not easily find a computer user who uses the direct kana input, though it was more common (but still rare) with people who used Word Processors from back in the day. There even were full kanji keyboards!

  4. It’s much quicker to use romaji for me. I can easily type whilst looking anywhere and wouldn’t want to slow that speed.

  7. I asked a few Japanese people about this a few months back. They all said almost everyone uses Romaji for desktop.

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