What Kind of Computer Keyboards are Used in China and Japan?
Where Western alphabets are divided into single letters, Asian languages use syllabic and meaning-based symbols which are less straightforward. These inherent differences between Western and Eastern language systems render traditional Roman character keyboards less efficient for the Chinese and Japanese. As a result, modified keyboards have been created for use in China and Japan. Other languages, including Russian, have their own modified keyboards as well. Japanese, also called nihongo, is a syllabic alphabet which is translated to a computer keyboard in a fairly simple fashion. Like a western keyboard, most Japanese keyboard models have one or two symbols per key, conforming to the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS), a system similar to the Western QWERTY system. To type words on a Japanese keyboard, you simply spell the word out by syllable as you would if you were writing it down. Most computers can also take transliterated Japanese words, that is, Japanese words phonetically writ
