Postby mmmason8967 » December 17th, 2013 9:47 pm
I don't have any experience of using the IME with Windows 8. The WIN + SPACE combination sounds like it's a new thing with Windows 8; in Windows 7 that key combination makes all open windows transparent so that you can see the desktop. Previous version of Windows use ALT + SHIFT instead--I don't know if it still works with Windows 8.
It's helpful to understand that there are two different things happening when you use the IME. First, Windows allows you to select as many different input methods as you want. Most of the time you'll only have a single input method set up, which will be your local keyboard layout--the US keyboard if you're in the USA, the UK keyboard in Britain, and so on. If you're learning Japanese you install the Japanese IME, and then you have two input methods. If you live in Israel and you're learning Japanese, you may very well end up with three input methods since Israelis tend to use Hebrew and English input methods, and Japanese IME would make a third. The important point here is that the ALT+SHIFT or WIN+SPACE key combinations cycle through all available input methods; if you only have two input methods (i.e. English and Japanese) it feels like it's toggling (switching backwards and forwards), but it isn't.
Once you get that idea it's fairly easy to understand that you can only select hiragana or katakana after you've selected the Japanese IME, because those options only exist within the Japanese IME. The IME usually starts off in alpha mode rather than hiragana--since we're using versions of Windows with menus and dialogs in English, that's probably the safest option (imagine a user on a shared machine accidentally switching input methods and having everything they type come up in hiragana).
Once you've selected the IME you can switch between alpha mode and kana mode using ALT plus the key that's at the top left corner of the main block of keys on your keyboard. On a US keyboard that key is the tilde; on the UK keyboard it's the key with the three punctuation marks that nobody ever uses. The big drawback for users outside the USA is that the alpha mode of the Japanese IME uses the US keyboard layout: if you use a UK keyboard like I do, it's not easy to find punctuation marks as the US and UK keyboards have most of them in different places.
If you can't remember the keystrokes for selecting katakana or hiragana, there's a handy trick I learnt off 奈津子先生: type the text in hiragana and then press F7, and it turns into katakana (similar to the way pressing space turns it into kanji). Once you get the hang of it, it's quicker and easier than switching into katakana, typing the characters and then switching back out again.
マイケル
