Now that I’m typing more Japanese I’m finding I make different kinds of typos.  In English I mostly make letter order mistakes, such as liek for like.  Every once in a while I make a “visual” typo like replacing a p with a b.

Here’s a Japanese phrase I was trying to punch in just a few minutes ago:

じょし せいと (joshiseito) – female student

There are many, many places this can go wrong:

transposition/the dyslexic ‘oops’ – swap the syllables in joshi (女子, female) and you get shijo (子女, child)

long vs. short vowels – lengthen the short to of seito (生徒, student) and you get seitou (政党, political party) or seitou (正答, correct answer) or… well, have a look.

The most disturbing typo I make is the aural mistake.  The Japanese “alphabet” is a phonetic system.  Voiced and unvoiced sounds can look similar.

ひ – hi

び – bi

ぴ – pi

They’re all basically the same sound–the way the tongue and lips move changes the way it comes out.

Typo-wise this creates some really weird mistakes.  In my mind I’m saying the right thing but my fingers don’t obey.  Here I made じょし(joshi, female) into しょし(shoshi, 書誌, bibliography).

I consider myself a visual person but for whatever reason when I type Japanese my internal ears fail me.  What kind of typos do you find yourself making?