WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Han
2 languages here are written in Han, and every one of them is typed by sounding a word out and picking the written form from a list rather than by pressing one key per character. They take 2 layouts between them — Pinyin and Romaji — so the language you pick decides the map you learn.
Logographic: each character represents a word or a meaningful part of one, and there are tens of thousands. No keyboard could have a key per character, so everything is typed through an input method — a romanised sound in Pinyin, a phonetic symbol in Zhuyin, or a decomposition into strokes in Wubi and Cangjie. The keystrokes are ordinary; the skill is choosing correctly from the candidates offered. Japanese is grouped here for its kanji, which are Han characters, and that is a simplification worth naming: ordinary Japanese also uses two kana syllabaries, and the practice words on its pages here are hiragana.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Distinct characters
- 128 distinct characters across 86 practice words
- Composition
- chosen from a candidate list rather than pressed
- Input
- typed through an input method, choosing from candidates
- Han keyboard layouts
- Pinyin, Romaji
- Keyboard guide
- shows the physical keys, and says so — no layout map yet
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in both languages below, most frequent first. They are what you will be composing most often rather than what sits on a key.
- き7
- か5
- し5
- と5
- う4
- こ4
- 天4
- あ3
- い3
- が3
The longest practice word in this script is せんせい in Japanese, and the widest bank to practise from is Japanese at 43 words.
The 2 languages written in Han
Other writing systems
- Armenian Created around 405 AD and unrelated to any neighbouring script, with 39 letters written left to right.
- Georgian Around 1,600 years old, unrelated to anything else, and — unusually — it has no capital letters at all.
- Greek The ancestor of both Latin and Cyrillic, in continuous use for around three thousand years.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.