7g7f, ７六歩 and P-7f are one move.

The squares

Files run 1 to 9 from the right, as seen by the player who moves first; ranks run from the far side down, a to i in Western notation and 一 to 九 in Japanese. A square is file then rank: 7f is the seventh file, sixth rank, the square in front of the first player’s seventh pawn. The same square is ７六 in Japanese, said nana-roku.

The three notations

Japanese	Western	Machine (USI)	What happened
▲７六歩	P-7f	7g7f	Black’s pawn to 7f.
△３四歩	P-3d	3c3d	White’s pawn to 3d.
▲２二角成	Bx2b+	8h2b+	Black’s bishop captures on 2b and promotes.
△同銀	Sx2b	3a2b	White’s silver recaptures on the same square.
▲４五角	B*4e	B*4e	Black drops a bishop on 4e.
▲６八飛	R-6h	2h6h	The rook swings to the sixth file: a ranging rook.
▲２三歩不成	P-2c=	2d2c	A pawn enters the zone and declines to promote.

• Japanese writes the destination square and the piece that moved: ７六歩 is “pawn to 7-6”. ▲ marks the first player, △ the second. 成 means the piece promoted, 不成 that it could have and did not, 同 that the move lands on the same square as the last one, 打 that a piece was dropped when a move could have been made instead. When two of the same piece could reach the square, a direction is added: 右 (from the right), 左, 上 (going up), 引 (pulling back), 寄 (sideways).
• Western notation, which the app uses in its game lists and analysis, gives the piece, then a dash for a move or × for a capture, then the square: P-7f, Bx2b+. A drop is written with an asterisk, B*4e, promotion with +, declining it with =.
• USI is for machines: from-square then to-square, 7g7f, with + for promotion and letter*square for a drop. It never names the piece, because the position already knows what stands on 7g. Every game the app keeps is stored this way, which is why it can replay any of them from the first move.

Reading a kifu

A game record is a kifu (棋譜). The Japanese file format, KIF, lists one move per line: the number, the destination and piece, and in brackets the square it came from. The opening of a Fourth File Rook game looks like this:

手数----指手---------消費時間--
   1 ７六歩(77)
   2 ３四歩(33)
   3 ６六歩(67)
   4 ８四歩(83)
   5 ６八飛(28)
   6 ８五歩(84)
   7 ７八銀(79)

Squares in the brackets use two digits, file then rank, so (77) is 7g and (28) is 2h. The app exports every finished game as a KIF file that any Japanese shogi program will open.

Two words you will hear

Sente (先手) is the player who moves first, shown with ▲ and drawn at the bottom of every diagram; in English, Black, though nothing is black. Gote (後手), △, is the second player, White. Having the move, in the sense of the initiative, is also called sente: a move that forces a reply “keeps sente”.