I don't know if this has already been discussed in another thread but I dislike reading Japanese when it's written in vertical columns. (This means I have to "put up with" the vertical writing in the two different Japanese readers I'm currently using.

I'm curious if the majority of Japanese learners feel the same way about this.

Another question: are there any current trends in Japan toward horizontal writing?

I was at the library looking at the Japanese magazines and alas, they seemed to all be printed in vertical columns.

Are there any engines on the web that convert vertical Japanese to horizontal?

Eh, I don't think its a big deal. I got used to it really quickly.

I used to feel the same way. I pushed myself to try reading vertically more when I was studying for N2, and eventually I ended up liking it more than reading Japanese horizontally! It feels faster somehow. Fiction is usually written vertically, but I've seen a lot of non-fiction books written horizontally.

I actually like the vertical writing. Maybe I'm still spellbound by the novelty of it all - I've only recently begun reading actual books in Japanese --- and in a proper, hardcover book, vertical columns make the text feel a lot less... compact ? I'm not sure how to put it. But anyway, I like it. It feels different, therefore fresh and exciting.

I don't know of any engines to convert vertial to horizontal, but I'm fairly certain a simple copy / pasting on about any text editor set to occidental script should do the trick, if you happen to have the text in ... well, text format.

I'm not that able a reader yet, but has always been my belief that if you're going to learn or do something, it's best to adapt to the way things are supposed to be done, rather than try to adapt everything to your own preference. That's my opinion.

Most websites and electronic reading sources will probably have the Japanese written horizontally, so you shouldn't even have need of something that would convert vertical Japanese to horizontal. However, even if there was such a thing, it wouldn't do you any good for things written on good old fashioned paper sources, so it's probably best to just try and get used to it.

You may find that after you really try, you'll come to appreciate it more.

I'm not a big fan of the vertical writing, but you have to get used to it if you're going to learn Japanese.

The only problem I have with it is that in books it usually means the lines end up being longer so I'm more likely to mistake what the beginning of the next line is. In manga (which is what I mostly read) it's feels more natural than horizontal text, simply because I've gotten used to it.

Not a fan of vertical writing. Then again, I'm not a big fan of reading fiction in general so that kind of explains why I haven't had that much practice with it. On a side note it bothers me slightly that Chinese fiction is for the most part written horizontally (pages still go from right to left like in Japanese), but Japanese still "preserves" the more traditional vertical writing. I think vertical writing has put me off reading fiction when if it was just laid out in the normal horizontal fashion I'd probably have ended up reading more. I don't have any issues reading stuff if it's on websites/newspapers/magazines though.

It's never bothered me. It's not even something I had to get used to, it's just how it is (the only thing I needed to get used to was turning the page with my left hand). I've never thought it was odd or anything, though I'd think anyone using vertical English script to be insane...
Maybe I'm the weird one?

Or maybe that's the way to think about it: whether vertical or horizontal, it is what it is.

frosty_rain Wrote:Most websites and electronic reading sources will probably have the Japanese written horizontally, so you shouldn't even have need of something that would convert vertical Japanese to horizontal.

In fact, there's an iOS app that does the opposite for newspaper columns available online, for the benefit of the people who are used to reading their columns vertically. I have it, not due to a preference for vertical writing, but because of its nice bonus of collecting daily columns from over 40 Japanese newspapers in one place. Personally I don't mind vertical, except for the occasions when an author decides to insert a whole sentence in a Western language.

Ebooks can be converted from vertical to horizontal and vice versa, as long as the software you are using has proper support for Japanese text (most Western ebook converters will not). Try AozoraEpub3, for example.

If you copy and paste pretty much any text from any source into Word, a TXT file or HTML, it will come out as horizontal text.

I like vertical text personally. Amongst other things, it makes browsing books at the book shop much easier, I don't have to keep tilting my neck to one side to read the titles of all the books. When reading the novels themselves, it just feels more authentic. The only novel I ever came across written horizontally was The Hobbit (ホッビとの冒険) and tbh it put me off reading it.

Never bothered me, and even if it did, it's not like anything's going to change to suit my preferences. There's no advantage or disadvantage to horizontal vs vertical as far as I can tell.