japanese text messaging

[keiko]

how do people in japan write cell phone text messages? do they have to scroll through all the characters to find the ones they want? isn't that impractical?

[Spaztick]

My guess is that they use the english romaji and that transforms into the kanji. They write in English, too, so either they have both Japanese and English buttons (yea right, that'd be WAY too many), they switch between alphabets (best possibility), or as I said above, they type in romaji and it turns into kana which some turn into kanji. I know because a penpal of mine just got a cellphone, and she sends messages to me in both english and japanese.

[lomagu]

Hey, actually, the buttons on their phones have hiragana and English letters. They can type in hiragana directly without using romaji. Also, when typing in hiragana, a list of common kanji automatically appears at the bottom of the screen. Then you can choose the right kanji for what you want to say.

[Kodi]

Well I was wondering about this recently too! =)

I actualy saw that my chinese friends all seem to write in english to each other when they text. Yet they use chinese online etc.
Must just be easier to write in english. Don't know how people who don't know english go about though...

Oh hirigana only for japanese would be easiest as lomagu says though of course. I don't know any japanese people like i know chinese though =p Chinese must be hard to text!

[Spaztick]

no sane person would build a chinese phone with 5000 keys for text messaging. Better to type in English.

[netarou]

百聞不如一見
百聞は一見に如かず
seeing is believing (chinese proverb ):)