Should I type sliding or tapping repeatedly on the Japanese phone keyboard?

11 comments

1. The general advice I’ve seen is tapping is easier but slower, sliding has a steeper learning curve but is slightly faster (so like typing vs sliding on an English keyboard lol). If you like the idea of sliding, feel like you’ll do *a lot* of typing, or enjoy doing things the “most efficient” way, it’s probably worth learning to slide. If not, tapping is perfectly sufficient.

2. Tapping is very old-school, included for compatibility with people who learned on old phones with physical keys.

   If you’ve never learned tapping you don’t need to start. The お sounds shouldn’t need 5 key presses in this day and age.

3. I just dove into using the mobile keyboard without looking up any advice so this post just made me pause as I had no clue what “sliding” meant. Switched over and tried it… life changing.

4. Wait you can TAP on them???? Wild I have only just discovered that now haha didn’t even know that was an option!

5. I can type by sliding my finger on the keyboard?!!?!?

6. To me is more comfortable sliding but I think that all depends an how you get used to use the keyboard.

   But I feel that sliding is faster tho

7. Here’s a rough breakdown of what natives do:

   On phones basically everyone uses the flick keyboard.

   On PC, from what I’ve read 80% use romaji input, 20% kana input. But I think kana input is mostly older people because I’ve never met a Japanese person IRL who didn’t type with romaji input.

   (romaji input means you create た by typing ‘ta’, in kana input you create it by typing ‘q’)

8. Sliding is way faster, once you get accustomed to the placement of the kana and where to go it starts becoming easier (probably the same as how we can type really fast on a normal keyboard)

9. I’ve never gotten into swipe type/sliding keyboards as they rely heavily on the built-in dictionary (i.e. good luck typing stuff like names, foreign words, and obscure words). Repeated tapping is slow as molasses, especially when you have to type kana symbols on the same row (e.g. なに).

   Kana flick keyboards are the best method by far in my opinion:

   * big buttons ensure typos are all but impossible

   * more efficient than tapping on a qwerty keyboard

   * extremely comfortable for one-handed use

   * and you learn the gojuuon (kana order) to boot

   Each tile corresponds to a kana row (あ・か・さ・た・な, etc.), the remaining 4 vowels are chosen by moving in one of the 4 cardinal directions. You can switch to QWERTY input for romaji with a single tap. And depending on the keyboard (e.g. gboard), you can easily type stuff like letters with accents too, without ever having to switch to another input language.

10. Sliding is waaay better, just a bit more of a learning curve. IMO romaji improved my typing speed significantly tho even after months of using 10 key, just cuz I was already fastish on normal English keyboard, and it made it easier for me to talk with natives since I wouldn’t take as long to respond, but to each their own.

11. It took me a while to figure out what you mean and I’m still not 100% sure. Unless you mean the sliding keyboard like the one that SwiftKey sort of pioneered, the most common “sliding” method of typing is called フリック入力 “flick” entry because you press and flick your finger in the direction of the character you want to type. It gets extremely intuitive and fast once you’ve internalized the pattern, and the consensus seems to be that flick entry is the fastest. I just found [one survey](https://aeonmobile.jp/column/smartphone-flick-input/#:~:text=65%EF%BC%85%E4%BB%A5%E4%B8%8A%E3%81%AE%E3%82%B9%E3%83%9E%E3%83%9B,%E7%B5%90%E6%9E%9C%E3%82%82%E5%87%BA%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%81%BE%E3%81%99%E3%80%82) that says 65% of smartphone users use the flick keyboard, which lines up with my experience.