Keyboard habits of Japanese computer users
There’s one very useful figure in this survey conducted by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into typing, namely the use of romaji versus kana input – wait until after the demographics and I’ll explain it!
Demographics
Between the 5th and 7th of June 2009 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 2.7% were in their teens, 17.3% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.
Japanese keyboards usually come with two layouts; one way to explain is to take as an example the word Tokyo, in kanji 東京. In romaji, meaning using the Roman alphabet to spell, one types “toukyou” on a standard QWERTY layout and presses the space bar to convert to kanji. For kana input, the five individual kana syllables that make up the word need to be typed, namely とうきょう, with an extra shift key push to get the small よ. On the standard kana layout, the keys correspond to “s4g)4″, so one can see that if you often mix Japanese and English, romaji input saves you having to learn two layouts.
On the other hand nearly all Japanese mobile phones use kana-based input, and indeed a recent phone was advertising as a unique feature the ability to input in romaji and convert to kanji.
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