Japanese is spoken in Japan, where it is the official language. It has a long history in the area - the earliest forms are believed to have come to the Japanese archipelago in the first century BC. Modern Japanese came into being during the Edo period, which began in 1600.
Japanese is normally written using three types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Some content in this application shows these native Japanese characters along with the Romaji transliterations of the Japanese words and phrases. Others may have just native characters or just transliterations.
If your content only shows native Japanese characters, or shows native characters before the transliterations, you may need to type those characters in various activities. To do so, you will need to install or enable the appropriate Japanese input method. See Installing an input method on Windows or Enabling an input method on Mac for details. After you have done so, follow the detailed instructions in Typing Japanese characters on Windows or Typing Japanese characters on a Mac. Japanese typing is not available for iOS or Android.
Note: Most activities that allow typing have an Easy Typing switch that can be set to On or Off. If you prefer to enter Japanese answers by selecting characters instead of typing them, set the switch to On. (On tablets, Easy Typing will be the only option for Japanese.)
If your content only shows transliterations, or shows transliterations before native characters, you should type the Romaji transliterations of the Japanese words and phrases in any activity or assessment that requires typed answers. You do not have to type the actual Japanese characters in transliterated content.
In transliterated Japanese, long vowel sounds may be indicated either by a single vowel with a macron (such as ō) or by two vowels in a row (such as oo or ou). See Typing accents or special characters for instructions on typing the macrons.