This was taken very quickly in one of the electrical stores near Shibuya 109 in Tokyo. They have many signs up saying no pictures and I’m not sure if that’s enforced or not but I wasn’t going to get caught anyway ^_^

Notice the space bar is smaller and has been partially replaced by a kana (かな) and English (ASCII) (英数) switch on either side. I almost bought an external keyboard that had a similar layout just so I could have a Japanese keyboard for back home in Australia.

Yes mac and Japanese nerd!

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A good way to sharpen your skills in this area is to switch your whole computer over to the Japanese for a day. On the mac, you can change the language in your System Preferences -> Language & Text and I’m sure it’s a similar place in Windows.

System Preferences – English and Japanese

It’s a scary thought but having to work out all the menu items and buttons can be a fun way to improve your Japanese vocabulary. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you have to translate just to get around your computer. ^_^

ファ

The word “File” as you would know is at the top of the first menu of most applications on your computer. It is written as ファイル, which is broken down as “ファ (fa) イ (i) ル (ru)”. The tricky part is the first two Katakana.

You may not have noticed but the katakana after フ is actually a small “ァ” and not the normal size “ア”. So when you pair “フ (fu)” with a small “ァ” the combination becomes “ファ” and is pronounced “Fa” and not the expected “Fua” with the larger ア.

The combination of “ファ” and “イ” gives us the “Fai” sound like in “Taiwan”. That sound together with ル (ru) gives us “Fai-ru” or “File”. Remember there is no “L” in the Japanese language.

ウィ

The ウィ sound is another katakana combination that you may not have encountered before. While it’s not rare, it’s certainly not something that you will see in most everyday textbooks.

The combination consists of “ウ (u)” and a “ィ (i)”. As with the example above the second katakana is smaller than normal and as such it performs a different function than a regular “イ” – like in the word for internet (インターネット).

So when you find the combination of “ウィ”, it is pronounced “Wi”. The easiest way to remember it is that Nintendo’s Wii console is spelt “ウィー”. We have the “Wi” followed by the long dash (chōonpu), which doubles the vowel so we get “Wii”.

I hope that has given you enough to work on. Apart from the chōonpu, there are also plenty of little Katakana tricks below such as the small “ョ” in “ショ”, which gives you “sho” (shi plus o). There’s also “ディ”, which is “de” plus “i” to give us “di”.

Work through the explanations below and please leave a note in the comments if you have any questions.

Download my free Katakana Beginner’s Worksheet to practice the basic Katakana and also check out my small tsu article for a little bit more about how the small hiragana and katakana work.

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UPDATE 8th May 2010: iPad shipping in Japan on 28th May 2010. No Japanese pricing announced as yet.

UPDATE 15th April 2010 : International orders have been delayed. iPad shipping internationally in late May and Japanese pre-orders start May 10th 2010.

Okay I’ll get it out of the way early – I’m an Apple fanboy and have been for a very long time.

So the news this week that the iPad will debut in the US on April 3 was pretty exciting.

What’s more exciting however, is that the iPad will also be available in Australia (where I live) and Japan (where I want to live) plus Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

While we have to wait a little longer, those of us outside the US will get to choose from all models at once and will also have the luxury of a month worth of user feedback from sales in the US.

I can’t wait to try one out and I am especially excited about the Japanese learning apps that will hopefully be released for the iPad in the coming months. The huge touchscreen will make for an awesome kanji stroke practice pad!

I’m leaning towards the 64GB Wi-Fi model – how about you?

iPad TV Ad

US Pricing

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of US$499 for 16GB, US$599 for 32GB, US$699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available for a suggested retail price of US$629 for 16GB, US$729 for 32GB and US$829 for 64GB.

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