How are Japanese characters inputted?

[Jonty]

I was wondering how non-alphabet symbols like Japanese, Chinese etc are got onto the screen, must be a bit time consuming if you have to click on some sort of mega table of them on the screen?

[vass0922]

Japanese keyboards have the special characters, Ken Kun said he's got a keyboard with both english and japanese chars

[Jonty]

Surely you would need quite a big keyboard just to create a fairly simple sentence? How many keys on one of these?

[Chuckiechan]

I'd like to see a photo of one of those.

Don't they have like, 3000 characters?

[Theophylact]

One way is to use a program that allows you to type in the romaji (i.e., Western) characters for the word. It then presents you with a choice of kanji ideograms that correspond to possible meanings, and you select from these. This looks like a good source of information...

[Mike]

I know at Sierra College, with the amount of Japanese students that go there, every computer has the Japanese language pack installed.

I see other students type in Japanese all the time.

[Jonty]

Interesting link Theophylact, it must take ages just to do a couple of sentences!

[Crix]

Originally posted by Chuckiechan
I'd like to see a photo of one of those.

such a small spacebar

[Chuckiechan]

I see why they are so smart. The dumb ones starve to death!...LOL!

[slinky]

I've seen a Chinese keyboard and it looked like this http://www.datacal.com/dce/catalog/c...overlays_l.htm on the keys. The spacebar is our size.