This online Japanese keyboard will help you type the Japanese language without having to install software or download anything. You can access it from any computer tablet or phone.
About the Online Japanese Keyboard
Normal Japanese keyboards have both hiragana and Roman letters indicated. This online Japanese keyboard only contains Japanese symbols. But you can still access the Roman letters on your normal keyboard.
Most of the non-alphanumeric symbols are the same as on English-language keyboards. However, you may find that some have changed places.
A few of the symbols like the square brackets, commas, or periods will have a different look than their English counterparts.
The hiragana symbols are also ordered in a uniform standard way across different keyboards.
On most Japanese keyboards, one key is devoted to switching between Roman characters and Japanese characters. After the kana (sound symbols) have been inputted into the text field, some systems will convert them into kanji (whole word symbols), or they may be left as they are.
About the Japanese Language
Japanese is a language that is spoken by approximately 128 million people.
Japanese dates back to at least the 3rd century where scribes in China made note of a few Japanese words. It wasn’t until 500 years later that we have a history of substantial texts.
In the 12th to 16th centuries the language started to evolve closer to the language we know today. The first loanwords from Europe started to appear at this time.
A loanword is a word from one language that gets adopted by another. In English, an example would be the word Tattoo that was originally a Polynesian word.
Japan was self-isolated until 1853. After that European loanwords increased dramatically.
Word order is normally subject-object-verb, as opposed to subject-verb-object in English. There are also no articles in Japanese, such as “the”, “a” or “an”.
Therefore the “The dog ate the food” would be expressed as “dog food ate”.
About the Japanese Alphabet
The modern Japanese writing system doesn’t use an alphabet the way we know it in English. Instead, it uses two different sets of characters.
The first called kanji that stand for whole words. These have been adapted from the Chinese language.
The second is known as kana which represents syllables and sounds.
Today almost all Japanese sentences in the written form have a mixture of kanji and kana.
The number of Kanji is known to be over 50,000 words. Students are required to learn 2136 of these in school.
About the only time, you will not see Kanji in Japanese text is children’s books, for teaching reading. Some computer games also will spell out words rather than using Kanji.
If you are a student of this great language, the online Japanese keyboard will help you to learn this writing system better.