How to Type Japanese on iPhone: Flick Input Guide

Typing Japanese on an iPhone comes down to one decision you make once and then live with for years: the 12-key flick keyboard, or the QWERTY romaji keyboard. Most people add the Japanese keyboard, see an unfamiliar grid of kana, and give up on it without ever learning the flick gesture — which is a shame, because flick input is the fastest way most people will ever type Japanese on a phone.

This guide adds the keyboard, explains the choice, and then teaches flick input properly.

Add the Japanese keyboard

The path is Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Japanese. Menu wording shifts between iOS versions, so if you cannot find that exact name, look one level up or down — or use the search field at the top of Settings.

You will then be offered the Japanese layouts. Two matter:

You can enable both. It costs nothing.

Switching between keyboards while you type

• The globe key, bottom-left of the keyboard, cycles through every keyboard you have enabled. That is the reliable method and it exists on every version.
• Swipe left or right on the space bar to move between your Japanese keyboards when more than one is installed. This is the fast way to get from the flick grid to QWERTY and back mid-sentence. If the swipe does nothing on your version, use the globe instead.
• Press and hold the globe key to get a list of your keyboards and pick one directly.

If there is no globe key and that corner shows a single emoji face instead, you have only one keyboard installed. Add a second and the globe appears there.

Flick input, from the beginning

The 12-key keyboard is a grid. Each key holds a whole row of the 50-sound table — 五十音 (gojuuon, "the fifty sounds"), the standard kana chart — with the first kana of that row printed on the key:

The final row is not a consonant row at all: it holds わ (wa, "wa") plus the modifier keys that add a dakuten or shrink a kana. Their exact labels and positions vary by keyboard and iOS version, so look at your own bottom row once and fix it in memory.

Two sounds deserve a warning now, because they look like they should be on the grid and are not. を (wo, the object marker) and ん (n, "n") both live on the わ key instead, as the section on it below shows.

Now the gesture. Tap a key and you get the kana printed on it. Flick it in one of four directions and you get the other four kana in that row.

The directions follow the order of the row: left is the second kana, up is the third, right is the fourth, down is the fifth.

The clearest place to see it is the あ key, where the five vowels form a small cross around it:

So う sits directly above あ and お directly below, with い and え on the sides. Once that cross is in your fingers, every other key works the same way, because it is the same five positions applied to a different consonant.

The か key, for example:

This is the standard layout, and it is the one iOS and Gboard both ship — so what you learn on one phone transfers to the other. You will occasionally see the directions described differently (a few older Japanese references put き up and く left); the arrangement has varied by keyboard app over the years. If your keyboard shows the on-screen flick guide, trust that: hold the key and it will display its own directions. The cross above is what the vast majority of phones use.

Rows with fewer than five kana simply leave directions unused. The や row holds only や (ya, "ya"), ゆ (yu, "yu") and よ (yo, "yo"), so tap, left and up are all it needs.

You do not have to flick fast. The gesture is a short slide in a direction; the keyboard reads the direction you moved, not the speed. A deliberate slide works exactly as well as a flick, and it is the right way to start.

Two worked examples

すし (sushi, "sushi"). す is the third kana of the さ row, so it is an upward flick on the さ key. し is the second, so it is a leftward flick on the same key. Two gestures, and your thumb never leaves one key.

ありがとう (arigatou, "thank you"):

Five gestures for a five-syllable word, with the thumb moving around one small grid instead of hunting across a QWERTY layout. That is the whole appeal.

Dakuten, handakuten and small kana

The two modifier keys do the work that the 50-sound table cannot fit onto the grid.

The dakuten key adds voicing marks to the kana you just typed. Tap it once and か (ka, "ka") becomes が (ga, "ga"). For the h-row, where the half-voiced mark applies, tapping again takes は (ha, "ha") to ば (ba, "ba") and then to ぱ (pa, "pa"), and one more tap returns it to は. The pattern is always the same: type the base kana first, then press the modifier.

The small-kana key shrinks a kana. あ (a) becomes ぁ (small a), や (ya) becomes ゃ (small ya), and つ (tsu) becomes っ (small tsu, the one-beat pause in words like きって — kitte, "stamp").

Some keyboards make the small kana a long-press on the kana itself instead. If your dakuten key does not shrink anything, try holding the kana down.

The わ key, and typing long vowels

The わ key carries the leftover sounds that do not belong to a consonant row:

That rightward flick is how you get ー, the long vowel mark, and it is the one you will reach for constantly in katakana. コーヒー (koohii, "coffee") is コ, then ー, then ヒ, then ー. The ー is not a doubled vowel here the way it would be in romaji — on the 12-key keyboard it is a character in its own right, so you press it once.

In hiragana you rarely need it. Long vowels there are written with a vowel kana, so とうきょう (toukyou, "Tokyo") is simply と う き ょ う, and おばあさん (obaasan, "grandmother") is お ば あ さん. Type what you see.

The symbols layer, the candidate bar, and kaomoji

Symbols and numbers. A key in the bottom function row switches the whole grid to digits and punctuation, and there is usually a second layer beneath that with rarer marks. The Japanese punctuation you will want lives there: 、 (the comma), 。 (the period), 「 」 (quotation marks), ・ (a separator between items) and 〜 (a range dash). Labels vary by iOS version; look for a key marked with digits or with "ABC".

The conversion candidate bar. As you type, a bar appears above the keyboard listing possible conversions. Type とうきょう and the bar offers 東京 (Toukyou, "Tokyo") and other options; tap one to replace what you typed. Tap the arrow at the right end of the bar for more candidates. This is also how you get katakana without switching modes: type in hiragana, and pick the katakana candidate.

Kaomoji. The Japanese keyboard includes a panel of text faces — 顔文字 (kaomoji, "face characters"), the kind of thing you will see in Japanese chat, like (^_^) or (T_T). There is a key that opens a scrolling list of them; tap one to insert it. Where that key sits depends on your keyboard and iOS version, so look along the bottom row and the symbols layer for a key with a face on it.

Flick or QWERTY on a phone?

Honest answer: it depends on what you already have in your fingers, and you should probably learn both.

Flick input's advantage is mechanical: fewer gestures, and thumbs aimed at nine big targets instead of thirty small ones. Its cost is that it takes a few weeks to feel automatic.

Romaji input's advantage is that it is free. If you touch type on a laptop, the phone QWERTY keyboard reuses that muscle memory immediately, and you can type Japanese in your first minute.

I am not going to hand you a study showing one is faster, because the honest answer depends on prior habit and on how much practice each typist has had. The practical split: if you will be in Japan, or texting Japanese friends, learn flick — it is the familiar default there. If Japanese is a study habit you mostly do on a computer, the keyboard you already know is fine forever.

One more point in flick input's favour: you never spell anything, so the は/ha trap disappears. You press the key labelled は and は comes out, even though it is read "wa". If that distinction is still new to you, how to type in Japanese covers it, and romaji vs kana input explains why the two modes disagree in the first place.

On Android

Gboard offers the same two choices, so nothing above is iPhone-only knowledge.

The path is roughly Settings → System → Languages & input → On-screen keyboard → Gboard → Languages → Add keyboard → 日本語 (nihongo, "Japanese"), then choose 12-key or QWERTY. Android menu names vary more than iOS ones because manufacturers reskin the settings app, so treat that path as approximate and use the search field.

Gboard's 12-key layout uses the same standard flick directions described above. Some versions also offer a combined layout that keeps a QWERTY letter row above the 12-key grid, which is worth trying if you want to keep romaji muscle memory while learning to flick.

If the keyboard is installed but Japanese will not come out, the problem is usually a mode or settings issue rather than the keyboard itself: Japanese IME troubleshooting walks through the usual causes.

Flick input is fast, but it does not teach you the language — and neither does QWERTY. Producing real sentences does, which is why Romaji.live has you type the pronunciation romaji of a Japanese sentence word by word. Start with the kana table until each character's sound is automatic, then take a session in practice mode. When accuracy is comfortable, typing speed is where to go next.