keyboard
as requested, here is a small pic of my wife’s japanese keyboard. as i discussed, the japanese language sometimes seems a little difficult on a qwerty keyboard, but is somewhat easier on a cell phone only because of the close layout of the phonetics on the phone key pad….
September 6th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
ã‚ã‚ŠãŒã¨ã†ã”ã–ã„ã¾ã™ã€‚Wow that looks confusing as hell. It would have to be easier to just use the normal western layout to type Japanese. But I guess if you didn’t know the English alphabet it would be kind of hard to do that wouldn’t it. So do the cellphones list kana or do they have the abc type layout of Western cellphones?
September 6th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
ouch! so small space-key O_O
September 7th, 2005 at 5:21 am
I’m not sure if this has been mentioned yet. But an idea for a show is festivals. Since I hear that Japan is festival crazy.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:29 pm
On Mac OS X, there is another way to enter Japanese. You simply choose the character set (hiragana or katakana) and then type away in romaji and it will automatically convert it. You hit space to make a word into a kanji. I find it works quite well, at least from a foreigner inputting Japanese on a qwerty keyboard.
September 8th, 2005 at 12:19 am
as soon as my wife can figure out how to auto focus her phone cam, i will post pics of my phone’s keypad to show you what it looks like as well….
festivals added to the list. thanks again L!
and yes, that is the method for those of us who don’t normally use our OS in japanese format. if you buy a pc or mac in japan, you will always get a kana KB. us pc users have that function as well. it’s called the language bar. how do you think i get the katakana up on the posts for the podcast?
September 8th, 2005 at 7:48 am
That’s so cool. It really is a small spacebar though.
September 9th, 2005 at 2:16 am
ya, it’s a pain in the ass when for whatever reason i have to use her computer.
i’m always hitting wrong keys. the “@” is off next to the enter key, and isn’t initiated by shift, so that is easier, but the apostrophe is shift+7. that is a real pain in the ass since japanese people don’t use ‘, it’s there for a reason.
that, and i always hit the magical “turn kanji on, turn romanji off” button since it’s next to the left control key….. i’m a hotkey freak!
September 9th, 2005 at 10:42 am
your podcast is the first gaijin in japan podcast that i can listen to and not just want to punch the speaker in the face, so congrats on that. that said i do wanna be just a little picky. you mentioned about nippon versus japan. and i liked what you said. the only thing is the o is actually more like the o in go. if that was the only mistake tho, i would let it go. however there is also two more issues. nippon is actually far less common in my expirience than nihon. same kanji and everything but nippon is usually used for things like cheering on the japanese team: “NIPPON, NIPPON!” maybe you already knew that but if not, ãŠçŸ¥ã‚‰ã›ã§ã™ã€‚also the kanji 日本 just means origin of the sun, to be specific but what you said was fine. the reason i bring it up is to tell you the wildly interesting tale of how we came to call it japan. it wasnt a mistake in pronunciation. the kanji for japan was actually made up by the chinese, which makes sense because from their prospective that is where the sun came from each morning. in chinese it is spelled rabon, but that is in the chinese version of romaji which is called pin yin. however pin yin is relatively new and the now defunct romaji from the days of yore was quite different. the r sound was denoted by a j. since p and b a very closely related in speach pathology the p sound was denoted by p’ and the b sound was denoted by simple p (similar to the t being t’ and d being simply d like in the word tao). anyway, in that system it was written japon, which eventually was read incorectely and morphed into japan using our standard pronunciation of the roman letters.
sorry for such a long-winded explaination, but i for one find it to be a very interesting story.
also sorry for the hypocrasy of correcting your japanese when my english is quite terrible.
September 9th, 2005 at 10:45 am
sorry one correction from my story. it sounds a lot like rabon but in pinyin japan is actually written riben. ã”ã‚ã‚“ãªã•ã„。
September 10th, 2005 at 12:05 am
Hey there Josh. Excellent commentary on Japanese culture from the foreigner perspective. I find myself saying, “Yeah, that’s what I’d say too,” often while listening. Maybe not so much about the wife and small children stuff, but everything else.
I’m also an active duty Sailor stationed in Nippon with a native significant other. I’m over at Yokota now, but will join you in Yokosuka this December. I was wondering, what’s your job and rate down there in Yokosuka?
Also, what are a few of your favorite places to check out around the Tokyo area? I’m partial to the natural places like Hakone, Nikko, Mitake-san and Takao-san, but I’m always looking for new places to explore.
Keep up the good work, and long casts. One show can usually get me all the way from Fussa to Shinjuku. That is if I don’t catch the Chuo Special Rapid.
September 10th, 2005 at 11:51 am
what in the world are you doing in yokota? i knew there were some of us in misawa, but not yokota……
I’m the LPO/ALPO of the ER on base. I guess you can deduct from that what my rate is…..
As for my favorites in and around tokyo, why are you asking me? you’re in tokyo? :p
Down here in miura though, i enjoy kanonzaki, enoshima, kamakura, and well, that’s about it. there’s really not much to do here. if you 2 are going to want to do something, you’re going to end up going north back up to tokyo, or maybe yokohama. there’s some good (not cheap) shopping in yokohama outside of sakuragicho station….
anyways, welcome to our little area, and i hope you enjoy it…
oh, is your other a JN? just curious….
take care, and thanks for the post!
September 15th, 2005 at 9:58 am
I haven’t listened to a whole podcast just yet and I figured I’d go ahead and give my two cents on the cell texting issue. I don’t speak a whole heckuva lot of Japanese, but I’ve found myself wanting to use Japanese more when texting just because it’s so much easier. Just like you say, the probable kanji just pops up, especially the kanji that you use most often, so it makes texting a breeze.
Now I just wish my phone had predictive text like US cell phones. But even with that, it seems that texting Japanese would be easier.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:48 am
Thanks Jordan,
The following URL: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107379 helps clarify how to use various language/keyboard input methods on Mac OS X. I would have never known unless I read it in this blog! 度も蟻 [ domo arigato]
September 26th, 2005 at 3:10 am
Here are coupe of URL’s to some photo examples of Japanese cell phone keyboards
http://www.sonyericsson.co.jp/semcfun/download/desktop/dl/wallpaper/so505i/so505i_01_s.html
http://www.sonyericsson.co.jp/semcfun/download/desktop/dl/wallpaper/w21s/w21s_02_s.html