Keyboards for inputting Japanese language -A study based on US patents

摘要

The most commonly used Japanese alphabets are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.The Kanji alphabet includes pictographs or ideographic characters that wereadopted from the Chinese alphabet. Hiragana is used to spell words of Japaneseorigin, while Katakana is used to spell words of western or other foreignorigin. Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the'kana input method' that uses a keyboard having 46 Japanese iroha (or kana)letter keys. The other method is 'Roma-ji input method', where the Japaneseletters are composed of English input from a standard QWERTY keyboard. Both themethods have their advantages and disadvantages. This article analyses two inventions on inputting Japanese language through acomputer keyboard. One invention uses a standard English keyboard to inputJapanese characters, the other invention uses a standard mobile phone key boardto input the Japanese characters.