Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language
by level3 on Friday January 12, 2018 @11:19AM
(#16133981)
Just as an anecdote, I know of at least one person in my company who uses it, without being anywhere near a professional typist. I suspect older generations may be much more likely to use it.
In any case, even though mostly everyone prefers the IME on their computers, I haven’t seen any Japanese people who prefer romaji input on their smartphones.
Technically speaking, Japanese have kana-based keyboard layout, where a single mora is a single keypress rather than two. However, there is still an extra (second) keystroke for dakuten/handakuten (か -> が), which is not required with romaji input (where it's just "ka" vs "ga"), so it's not a 100% speed increase. So, typing is somewhat more efficient than with romaji, but I think I've heard no one uses that, except for, possibly, professional typists.