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Originally posted by ali92 I'm looking for a keyboard that shows all of the characters in either the Western European languages or Character Sets and a Keyboard that shows all of the Japanese characters (Hiragana and Katakana) (including English alphabet) along with the regular symbols. Is there a keyboard out there that has both or ALL of the main languages on it (where you can see the characters on the keys)? Thanks in advance!

yes they exist. I used to have one.

want me to tell you where to find them?

they're pretty expensive outside of japan unfortunately

actually I don't remember the sets of characters they had but I know they had the hiragana for sure. that's like essential.


I was in Taiwan in june and it cracked me up cause they had roman alphabet + 3 extra characters per key .... I still wonder how they type on these things.

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Originally posted by ali92 (...) a Keyboard that shows all of the Japanese characters (Hiragana and Katakana) (including English alphabet) along with the regular symbols (...)

Just wondering, if a keyboard shows the hiragana characters, why would it need to show the katakana ones as well? You'd just need to press shift plus the character in hiragana to get its correspondent in katakana, eh? Hey, how do we write in kanji then?

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Originally posted by jdat yes they exist. I used to have one. want me to tell you where to find them? they're pretty expensive outside of japan unfortunately actually I don't remember the sets of characters they had but I know they had the hiragana for sure. that's like essential. I was in Taiwan in june and it cracked me up cause they had roman alphabet + 3 extra characters per key .... I still wonder how they type on these things.

Where can I get one? Also, in the Roman alphabet "part", is the layout in UK or US format?

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Originally posted by Maaz Just wondering, if a keyboard shows the hiragana characters, why would it need to show the katakana ones as well? You'd just need to press shift plus the character in hiragana to get its correspondent in katakana, eh? Hey, how do we write in kanji then?

OK, my mistake. It IS like that because over here, we only have ONE letter on the keyboard to mean BOTH uppercase and lowercase. So, it makes sense. Hiragana/Katakana's easy but, what about Kanji? That HAS to be hard! Kanji's Chinese characters and there's thousands (I think over 10000!) of different characters that mean different words.

After some research I found out that it's not that hard to write using kanji. You write its pronounce in katakana (or hiragana) and when you finish the word, there's a programme that shows you what kanji you could use. Simple, eh?

PS.: I'm pretty sure that there are at most 4000 kanjis in japanese, and we "just" need to learn about half of them... it's a shame there aren't many jap TA's to help us out.

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quote:

Originally posted by Maaz After some research I found out that it's not that hard to write using kanji. You write its pronounce in katakana (or hiragana) and when you finish the word, there's a programme that shows you what kanji you could use. Simple, eh? PS.: I'm pretty sure that there are at most 4000 kanjis in japanese, and we "just" need to learn about half of them... it's a shame there aren't many jap TA's to help us out.

I heard about all of what you said at least 3 years ago! You only need to know about 1980 Kanji to read a newspaper. But, does this program come with Japanese/East Asian Windows installations? Linux?

Thanks for the info still. I'm sure that there's people on here that didn't know that, even though I did when I used to be "obsessed" with Asian languages/culture back in 1999/2000. I just forgot about it, since it was 1999...