Typing and displaying Japanese

Japanese for Windows

You can read and write Japanese using Windows, though it requires a little setup.

Displaying Japanese Characters

If you have Japanese systems installed on your computer, it is be easy to display Japanese characters. Even if you don't, most browsers can display Japanese characters very easily if you just follow the procedure below.

For Internet Explorer:

1. Go to "View", and then "Encoding".
2. Select "Japanese (Auto Select)".

For Netscape or Firefox:

1. Go to "View", and then "Character Encoding".
2. Select "Auto-Detect", and then "Japanese".

Typing in Japanese

Microsoft Global IME lets you input Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text into Microsoft Word documents, Web forms, and e-mail messages on any language version of Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, and other operating systems.

1. Switch the mode into Japanese
2. You use “romaji”, or English letters, to type Japanese. There are some tricky ones you need to know.
   • Type ‘nn’ for ‘ん’. For example type ‘sennsei’ for ‘せんせい’ and ‘mikann’ for ‘みかん’.
   • Type ‘wo’ for the particle ‘を’.
   • Type the following consonant twice for small ‘っ’. For example type ‘itta’ for ‘いった’ and ‘gakkou’ for ‘がっこう’.
   • Type ‘ha’ and ‘he’ for the particle ‘は’ and the particle ‘へ’ respectively.
   • For the long vowel sign ‘ー’ type – (hyphen). If “ー” doesn’t appear, press the “Space” key to choose the right one.
3. If you want hiragana for the word, type the word and press the “Enter” key. For example, type ‘neko’ and press the “Enter” key for ‘ねこ’.
4. If you want katakana for the word, type the word in hiragana and press “F7” key. The hiragana word will change into highlighted katakana word. If it’s correct, press the “Enter” key to confirm.
5. Pressing “F6” changes highlighted words to hiragana.
6. If you need to write everything in katakana, click on ‘あ’ in the Japanese mode box and click on ‘Full-width Katakana’. This will change everything you type into katakana. Make sure to set it back to Hiragana mode after you type the katakana word you need.
7. If you want kanji for the word, type the word and press the “Space” key. If the kanji that appears first is the right one, press the “Enter” key. If the first one is not the right one, press the “Space” key again. Your computer will come up with a list of kanji with the reading you typed in. Choose the right one by pressing the “Space” key until the right one is highlighted and then press the “Enter” key. For example, for ‘朝’ type ‘asa’ and press the “Space” key. If the first one that appears is ‘朝’, press the “Enter” key. If the first one is not ‘朝’, press the “Space” key. There will be a list with ‘朝’‘阿佐’‘麻’‘安佐’‘アサ’‘あさ’ and more. Use the “Space” key to choose the right one and then press the “Enter” key.
8. Number related words come in a variation such as ‘一月’‘１月’ and ‘三人’‘３人’. Press the “Space” key, choose the one you need and press the “Enter” key.
9. If you need Roman capital letters such as ‘CD’ and ‘NSW’, press the “Shift” key while you type the desired letters. So far we have learnt how to type a single word. You can do the same to write a sentence but that would be too bothersome and you usually don’t do that.
10. When you write sentences/passages, you usually keep typing until you finish either a clause or a sentence and then check each word.
    • The “Space” key is used to get a word list box for the thick-underlined part (or the high-lighted part) and to scroll to and highlight the right word.
    • The arrow key “→” is used to move back and forth to the next part.　
    • The “Enter” key is used to confirm the whole sentence.
    • See the help documentation that is installed with Microsoft Global IME.
11. Small letters, mostly used for writing foreign words in Katakana, can be written by typing an x or l before the letter you want. For example "Party" can be typed "pa-texi" and you get "ﾊﾟｰﾃｨ".
12. The obsolete characters ゐ and ゑ, and their katakana equivalent ヰ and ヱ, can be typed by the letter combination 'wyi' and 'wye' respectively.

Japanese for Mac Users

Mac OS X comes with support for reading and editing Japanese--in documents, in email, and on the web. To activate it, click on the international icon in the System Preferences, and select the Input Menu tab (Apple Menu > System Preferences > International > Input Menu tab). Check the box next to the languages you want to use. Also check the option to show input menu in menu bar. Click the images below to enlarge them and see how to do this.

You can now use the menu below (which now appears in the upper right of the menu bar) to select the language you want to type in.

Here's an tip: there is a keyboard shortcut to switch between languages without using this menu. It is Apple-space bar. Unfortunately, it does not work in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, because the same shortcut is assigned to Spotlight. To fix this conflict, click on Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences, select the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab, and uncheck the Spotlight shortcut or reassign one of the conflicting shortcuts, as shown below.)

If you don't know how to input text in Japanese, the input menu has a help option. In Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), the help is in English or Japanese, but in earlier systems there is no English help for Japanese input. So, you may want to consult Apple's Japanese Input Method Guide. It was written for earlier systems, but the section on entering Japanese text is still good. See [1].

Many applications support Japanese; some of these are described below. Often you can switch an application's menus so they appear in Japanese as well. Select the application's icon in the finder and choose Show Info from the File menu, then look in the languages pane, shown below; see if Japanese is listed, and check the box next to it.

Go to Apple menu > System preferences > International > Languages. Add Japanese to the list of languages. If you drag Japanese above English in the list, the finder and many other applications will open next time with Japanese menus. Even if you do not want Japanese menus, make sure Japanese appears somewhere in your list of languages. Just having it there unlocks Japanese features in certain software, like Japanese encoding in Apple's Mail application. Click the illustration below for a larger picture of the whole pane.

In Mac OS 9 -- including the Classic Environment that runs older applications within OS X -- you can read and write use Japanese, but you need to take extra steps when you install or upgrade the system. The Nisus Software site has an illustrated guide. If you want to install Japanese into the classic environment of a Power PC OS X machine, use the "Install Language Kits" utility in Applications (Mac OS 9)/Apple Extras/Language Kits. None of this is an issue with the newer Intel-based Macs, since OS 9 doesn't run on them.

Mac OS 8.5 and 8.6 contained support for browsing the web in Japanese. Apple's Japanese Language Kit used be sold separately, and allowed you to write in Japanese with these systems (or read and write with even earlier systems).

Japanese for Linux Users

If you don't have any Japanese fonts installed, install some. The acronym CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) might be useful in your search.

All common Linux distributions support Anthy and Scim, which together allow you to write in Japanese. You may also want to change your locale to UTF-8. Do a web search for distribution-specific instructions and it should be painless.

Kiten, an English/Japanese dictionary that's part of KDE, is also worth installing.

See also

• Buying a computer.
• Getting internet.
• Japanese electricity.