1 hour ago, a-447 said:

Japan uses 2 alphabets as well as around 2,000 Chinese characters.

All 3 scripts are visible in the photo 

 

As I mentioned,  Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, latter Chinese characters.  I always wondered how they coped with typing! Even after 30 visits or so, i can't work it out! As I understand  it, though I can be corrected, you can also  write across, or up and down!

23 hours ago, Keithambrose said:

As I mentioned,  Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, latter Chinese characters.  I always wondered how they coped with typing! Even after 30 visits or so, i can't work it out! As I understand  it, though I can be corrected, you can also  write across, or up and down!

If you wanted something typed, you had to take it to special companies which employed women to do the typing.

They sat in front of a massive machine that had around 7000 kanji characters on a large wheel, and the typist had to spin the wheel to find the character, place the cursor over it and hit a lever. The characters were grouped according to certain elements they had in common (too complicated to explain here), along with the number of strokes to write them. It was a very specialised and time -consuming job.

I bought the first personal typewriter that came out in the seventies. It used a similar system to classify the characters, which were laid out on a square board in front of you. Once you found the character you'd position the cursor over it and push a lever. 

You would be surprised how 'fast' you could type, once you got used to it. It did, however, require a good knowledge of kanji.

This was later replaced with a digital typewriter. We still use the same system today. You type the word either in the hiragana or English alphabet and the word changes into the kanji. There are a lot of homonyms in Japanese so after you've typed the word, all the different words using different kanji for each meaning appear and you just choose the word.

These days a lot of Japanese can no longer write kanji very well by hand, although they can read them without any problem. It's a bit like us when we don't know how to spell a word, but we can read it.

Now Japanese is only written left to right or down the page. The newspapers often have headlines written across the pages but the columns are always written down, moving right to left. So what we would call the back page is their front page. The same applies to books and magazines.

 

 

7 hours ago, a-447 said:

These days a lot of Japanese can no longer write kanji very well by hand, although they can read them without any problem.

Also many Japanese people prefer to type romaji rather than kana. It's twice as many keystrokes but you don't need to use the shift key.