[anyfoo]

This is actually pretty common. It's less obvious with Chinese or Japanese, as the input method there usually matches the transliteration based on how the word is spoken (romaji in Japanese, pinyin in Chinese), which of course does not look unusual.

For example, you wouldn't think twice about it if for the Japanese word for washing machine, you not only saw "洗濯機" (which is how it's written in Kanji), but also "sentakuki" or "sentakki" in the search results, because even to non-Japanese speakers it's pretty clear that that's probably the Japanese word for washing machine written with latin character transliteration, and pretty much exactly what you'd say.

With Korean, it looks more jarring, as the input method is apparently very different, and seems to map the keys for unrelated latin letters to Hangul letters? (I have no idea, I don't know anything about Hangul other than it's based on syllables, kind of like Hiragana/Katakana, and apparently very logical.)

[duskwuff]

> With Korean, it looks more jarring, as the input method is apparently very different, and seems to map the keys for unrelated latin letters to Hangul letters?

More or less, yes. Each Hangul character represents a syllable, and is composed of two or more components (jamo) representing individual phonemes (like vowels or consonants) which make up the syllable. The keys on a Korean keyboard are mapped to those jamo.

Further details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers

[lifthrasiir]

More specifically, since Korean syllables are of the form CV(C) where C is a consonant and V is a vowel, almost all Hangul keyboard layouts divide the entire keyboard into two or three sections (consonant-vowel or initial-medial-final). The standard KS X 5002 layout is the former, a "bipartite" method (두벌식), while I'm using one of the latter, "tripartite" methods (세벌식).

[sshine]

With Chinese you have 简拼 (jiǎnpīn) for your pinyin input, which lets you type only the initial Latin letters of a common phrase to complete the phrase.

For example, instead of typing “buzhidao” to get 不知道, you just type “bzd” and pick the top suggestion. Since all the phonetic endings are gone, it does look a little cryptic, but it means if you don’t have a pinyin keyboard, you can still type something fast that is highly correlated with your actual phrase.

For example when you’re searching a movie title on your SmartTV; teenage mutant ninja turtles (similarly abbreviated tmnt) becomes rzsg; some Chinese search tools will pick up on this; whether through statistics, fuzzy matching or specific 简拼 (jiǎnpīn) support, I don’t know.

[bmandale]

Kana input exists in japanese and reuses each letter of the keyboard to mean a different kana. So you could have a similar confusion in japanese. I believe many older people use it.

[anyfoo]

Yeah, you can clearly see it on Japanese keyboards, which do show the individual kana. But as you allude to, I’m not sure it’s super popular anymore.

[karmasimida]

Hangul is its own alphabet and has its own keyboard, so the letters typed don't have correlation with typical romanization scheme at all.

It is probably more like bopomofo keyboard for Chinese