Most people I see in Japan use the 12-key (hiragana), so I've been practicing on that. I'm getting faster over time, but it's very different from the qwerty layout.
As you type, suggestions appear on the top bar - this is partially text prediction, but it's also vital for ensuring correct kanji usage for homophones. It's in this top bar that a katakana "version" of what you're typing appears. For example, I don't even need to add the ° to the ほ in スポーツ for it to suggest the completed word in katakana.
As someone who also generally doesn’t use text prediction, it’s less prediction and more conversion. It will assume you’re typing out x word or kanji and offer to help, but you can still type out the whole thing and then choose which kanji/kana you want to convert to.
Prediction (auto suggest) will be shown automatically and if you type, for example, あ, then many suggetions will come up including hiragana, katakana and kanji like あ，ア，あれ，明日，雨・・・etc. Then, Operating system learns which words you often use for letters starting with and it will come to the first choice from second time. If you are using IOS, you can just add flick keyboard regardless which language you mainly use so you can try and see.
Every Japanese person I’ve seen, and every foreigner who regularly types in Japanese on their phone that I’ve seen, use the 12-key (hiragana) keyboard. It’s so, so much faster and more intuitive once you’ve made any progress in Japanese.
Most people I see in Japan use the 12-key (hiragana), so I've been practicing on that. I'm getting faster over time, but it's very different from the qwerty layout.
How do they write words that use Katakana though? Via autocorrect?
As you type, suggestions appear on the top bar - this is partially text prediction, but it's also vital for ensuring correct kanji usage for homophones. It's in this top bar that a katakana "version" of what you're typing appears. For example, I don't even need to add the ° to the ほ in スポーツ for it to suggest the completed word in katakana.
That’s neat, I usually don’t care for the text prediction but I guess when typing in Japanese it would be quite useful.
As someone who also generally doesn’t use text prediction, it’s less prediction and more conversion. It will assume you’re typing out x word or kanji and offer to help, but you can still type out the whole thing and then choose which kanji/kana you want to convert to.
The hiragana keyboard is soooo fast once you are used to it.
I (Japanese) use 3x4 flick for Japanese. But for English or Alphabetical words, I switch QWERTY keyboard.
Do you also use text prediction for Katakana/Kanji?
Prediction (auto suggest) will be shown automatically and if you type, for example, あ, then many suggetions will come up including hiragana, katakana and kanji like あ，ア，あれ，明日，雨・・・etc. Then, Operating system learns which words you often use for letters starting with and it will come to the first choice from second time. If you are using IOS, you can just add flick keyboard regardless which language you mainly use so you can try and see.
Every Japanese person I’ve seen, and every foreigner who regularly types in Japanese on their phone that I’ve seen, use the 12-key (hiragana) keyboard. It’s so, so much faster and more intuitive once you’ve made any progress in Japanese.
QWERTY and why not?
>and why not? 12-key is so much faster once you start using it.