Building our own…

At YOUMEWE we are working to develop educational software that will help Japanese speakers develop their typing and computer literacy skills. As English speakers we often taken for granted how easy it is for us to sit down in front of a computer and start using every application right away. When we started to teach computer programming lessons at YOUMEWE it became obvious that simple functions and inputs in English became very complicated difficult functions in Japanese. A simple word like "user" becomes an advanced kanji ( user- 利用者 (りようしゃ)). This presents some major problems for young learners trying to use the computer for the first time. An even bigger problem people learning computer literacy face in Japan is a very complex input method for typing Japanese. Typing in Japanese involves typing English romaji with some extra rules for special articles, like u う needs to be written as lu / xu ぅto get the smaller article. To input more advanced Kanji the users often need to find the kanji they are looking for in a long drop down list. Navigating that list of Kanji and knowing how to find what you want is almost a whole additional skill that Japanese speakers need to learn in order to become fully computer literate. Because of all this added complexity it is common for Japanese people to start using computers at a much older age than their, English speaking counter parts. At YOUMEWE we are developing a new type of Educational software to help jump start computer literacy at a younger age and help lower the barrier of entry for all computer literacy learners in Japan.