I haven't made a new post here in a long time! I'm not dead, I'm doing well, I passed all my exams in June and I finally got my dream keyboard, the IBM Model M! Here it is (my camera made it look yellow even though it's not yellow at all):
(image)
Katakana?
You may have noticed I have taped katakana stickers over the keycaps. I've been slowly learning Japanese and I was having a hard time getting used to the Japanese keyboard layout when typing kana, so I thought it would be easier to learn if I put stickers on the keyboard. Instead of ordering stickers, I made my own, since why not? I drew the gojuon table on a paper sheet, wrote all the syllables in it with a pencil, cut the stickers out and used clear Scotch tape to glue them to the keycaps. Simple, functional, free and has a fun DIY chaotic look!
Why katakana stickers instead of hiragana? I currently know hiragana better than katakana and hiragana is usually what I type in when using the IME, so I thought having katakana on my keyboard could be a good way to get a bit more katakana usage. If I remember a katakana syllable, I can find it on the keyboard and type in the matching hiragana syllable, which rewards learning katakana. When I type in a hiragana syllable into the computer, I can look at the keyboard to see the matching katakana syllable. I know most IMEs can use romaji instead of kana, but I like kana (and kanji) and I want to use it a lot more than romaji, so that my brain will associate Japanese with kana and not romaji.
I taped the stickers on a bit randomly and they often obstruct the Latin letters. This is not an issue for me, since I can easily touch-type the Latin alphabet. For kana, I have already memorized where the most common syllables, like or
are on the keyboard, but I'm nowhere near touch typing for now.
Something that often trips me up with hiragana is left and right, I ALWAYS get and
confused!! When handwriting, I also noticed myself writing
and
backwards! This is funny to me as I haven't had much left/right confusion in my life before. I guess I'll remember it better over time, much like I don't confuse Latin d, b, q and p. People also often consider katakana
,
,
and
painful to distinguish, but I somehow don't seem to have much trouble with those.
Disclaimer: My Japanese is terrible and please don't take my words as a tutorial to quickly learn Japanese or anything like that. I'm only sharing my ideas which I think work for me ^_^