Trying to make the switch to native keyboards to maintain my kana “fluency.” I found this beauty on Japanese amazon, it delivers to me and even with shipping wouldn’t be much more than the fully Roman character version.
But I was wondering if there were any UK websites that sell native keyboards anywhere before I commit?
Only like 6% of natives use a hiragana keyboard, everyone else uses romaji input
It’s so much cheaper to just buy hiragana key caps and change your keyboard in your operating system if you wanna put yourself through that grief though!
Or do what everyone else does and just install a JP IME and use the current keyboard you use
Yeah, I never met a Japanese person who uses kana input (I’ve lived and worked in Japan since 2016), though obviously if you want to do it as a “for fun” kind of thing, that’s fine as well.
(& @Leebo ) Yeah thats what I found elsewhere, I might as well keep using romaji and my phones flick keyboard for now (I’ll still get it eventually, but just for fun… I find the busyness of this keyboard so frikin cute. So if there isn’t a point from the beginning I’m going all the way 
)
On phones I use 12キー which I find pretty efficient:
For keyboard I just use romaji. I briefly considered learning to touchtype hiragana but it’s just very difficult to rationalize it if you can already type fast in rōmaji. It would take me a lot of practice to get any benefit from it, and let’s face it: typing speed is not what slows me down the most when I write Japanese…
EDIT: oh that is flick keyboard. I didn’t know it was also called that way. Makes sense.
Watch me get this keyboard and STILL use romaji! 
Ditto. Except from 2001.
Yeah when I started learning russian I actually took the time to learn how to touchtype йцукен (the Russian layout) but I think that makes more sense because the latin-based mappings are a bit annoying to setup and to use (and no native computer would use that out of the box). But for Japanese there’s very little advantage to switching to hiragana mapping besides potentially typing speed if you become extremely comfortable with the layout while being able to output Japanese at a very high pace.
Thing is, if you try to use kana-entry method for practicing kana, you’re not actually practicing kana, you’re just re-learning how to type. 
You got me there… I guess it would only help if I forever starred at the keyboard while I typed (like I did when I was 10 lol!)
Romaji input needs to type 2 keys per Kana in most best cases, counting si, ti, zi, di, but Kana input needs to type 1, and that could account for typing speed.
Following Nihon Shiki romanization, and you could get the notion of rows, without needing to type 3 keys for exceptions.
I wouldn’t use a keyboard without Thai layout written on the keys, and I don’t want to buy stickers to add Thai letters to the keys. (Maybe this is an option for Kana layout, except that practically no one use it.)
There are things about Enter shape and some keys, particularly right hand side, may change positions, and I have preference and rejection for that too.
Learning a language that doesn’t use alphabetic input would be bothersome for a laptop user, at least.
It’s a little less than two on average because of じゅ, ちょ, りょ, etc only require 3 keys to type two kana using rōmaji, but that doesn’t change your overall point, at very high cpm kana input will be faster.
This page has some more precise stats for the performance of the various layouts in terms of numbers of key presses:
Note that the left-most column is for a Thumb-Shift layout which is different than the Japanese layout we were discussing so far (and probably harder to learn, if even more efficient for Japanese input). The “basic” JIS kana layout we were discussing is the middle column.
EDIT: There’s also this amusing animation comparing the relative speeds of the three layouts:
Note that this website is made by the corporation that promotes Thumb Shift keyboard, so they may cherry pick use cases that favor them.
Why would you want a worse keyboard layout?
(If curious) This was basically a long defence stating: is fun bro
So the reality is the extra keys just replace keys that you would actually use. (I speak from experience, and it’s why I bought a 3rd party replacement keyboard for my thinkpad).
Also back to the layout, you will be far more productive just coping with romaji, as Japanese people do as well.
I wanna try to be a little more productive and second what others said and just find keycaps with the kana on them and kind of leave it be.
If you are doing it because you enjoy it, then go for it. There does not have to be a practical reason to learn something if you enjoy learning it.
I expect that most of the replies (I know mine was) were from the perspective of thinking that you were thinking that “Japanese people must do this and so I should (need to) learn too”.
Yeah that’s where I started, then I realised how JP Amazon only had a few kana input keyboards so it must not be the case. My use of “native keyboards” is probably where everyone got that! I must’ve still been leaning on an assumption that Japanese kids learned kana input typing like we learn QWERTY. (I know I’m wrong now haha)
I love hearing from expats on my posts so yours and @Leebo ‘s input was super appreciated! (And interesting to know!) 
I have only ever seen a kana only keyboard a few times and never in use. In all cases they were on hand in testing and verification labs of the clients I was working with in case specific uses cases related to kana only keyboard/input needed to be tested.
All my keyboards can be used in direct kana input mode and do include kana as a secondary label. Any PC or keyboard you buy here will be a Japanese variant of the standard keyboard which includes some extra keys. All of the alphanumeric keys are in the same layout position, but many (most) of the punctuation (main or shifted) are different which takes some getting used to. If I am working primarily in English or I am coding I have my keyboard set to English and I type all the symbols from memory, not by what is written on the key (for example open and close brace are on key “9” and “10” but in Japanese mode they are on keys “8” and “9”). If I am working mostly in Japanese I switch to Japanese mode but I have to mentally switch my key memory for the symbols to different keys. Whenever I first make the switch I make a lot of mistakes until I get into the new mindset. The main reason I switch back and forth is that when I am coding I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts (rarely touch the mouse) and I have 40 years of keyboard/muscle memory using those editors and IDEs.
Starting at about 3m52 into this video there’s a minute long scene with footage of a typist using a manual kanji typewriter:
