Installing Japanese Support and Writing Japanese on a Mac

[Towa]

What I did was enable only Romaji (direct input) and Hiragana input, and then I set the keyboard shortcut for "Select the next input source in the input menu" to Alt+~ (you could set this to something you might be more comfortable with). This way I can switch very quickly between English and Japanese input like I do in Windows.

The best way is just to buy a Japanese keyboard. And I actually like the Japanese keyboard layout much more.

Where would you buy a Japanese keyboard? The closest thing I have found are those keyboard slip covers with the Japanese writing on them.

[Bueller_007]

Where would you buy a Japanese keyboard? The closest thing I have found are those keyboard slip covers with the Japanese writing on them.

Well, I live in Japan, so finding Japanese keyboards is not that difficult for me. I'm not sure where you'd find them abroad, but I'd imagine electronics shops that specialize in Japanese imports would carry them.

[Towa]

Well, I live in Japan, so finding Japanese keyboards is not that difficult for me. I'm not sure where you'd find them abroad, but I'd imagine electronics shops that specialize in Japanese imports would carry them.

Thank you. But considering where I live, I may not find one unless I go into a major city(Which wouldn't be too difficult). However, if anyone does has a website that sells them, it would be great if you posted. them.

[Alcyone]

Ahah! どうもあ りがと ございました, Anneさん! Turns out I have to type "onnna" (3 n's) to get the right Kanji.

[Feik]

I just leave my MacBook set to Romaji then I can switch to Hiragana with ctrl-shift-j, katakana ctrl-shift-k and back to romaji with ctrl-shift-;

Although I am curious to give a JMac a go... I wonder how different the keyboard is.

[jmignot]

There is a comprehensive (177 pages!) reference document, from the time of System 9 but still applicable, on the Apple Web site. It contains essentially everything you will ever need to know on the kotoeri input system — and incidentally also on Chinese and Korean input!
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50037

[jemstone]

just a note, for those running 10.4, if you have spotlight by default, it may be necessary for you to uncheck the apple+space shortcut combo for spotlight so that it can be used for the international language thing to work.

edit:
also you could use the apple+option+space combo to cycle through the various input methods.

this won't be convenient if you had a ton of different other languages in there though.

[keikony]

ok, I have figured out based on the instructions here (thanks, everyone!) how to type my emails in Japanese. Except that even though I've picked hiragana in the menu bar, everything is still changing to kanji. For right now, I want just hiragana. (i notice that if i don't use the space bar, it stays hiragana. am I not supposed to use the space bar? I'm used to using it, typing in english. )

[Jason]

Yes, that's how it's supposed to work. You should notice a line underneath the kana as you type. When that line is there, that means if you hit the space bar then it will convert the underlined characters to kanji. Pressing enter will dismiss that line.

[keikony]

わかりました。　ありがとう！

[spidey]

I'm a new Mac user and I want to learn how to break kanji down on a Mac.

On a PC when I paste kanji into a Widows word doc I can highlight it and then key the space bar to break it down.

This doesn't work on MAC.

Can you help me?

[Psy]

Highlight and press shift+control+r.

[spidey]

Thank you very much Psy.... BUT...nothing happens when I...

Highlight and press shift+control+r.

I wonder if I need to change the keyboard settings.

I have MAC OS 10. I can type in 日本語。

But for some reason I cannot reverse kanji to hiragana.


Hmmm...

[KatH]

spidey, to do that, the only way it would work for me was when I was under 'Hiragana' for the language. So while I usually type in English and have that set, if I want to see the composition of a kanji, I need to change it to Hiragana. Then, once I highlight and do shift+control+r, the breakdowns will appear.

[Alcyone]

Thank you for posting about the highlight-shift-CTRL-R trick!

You have no idea how much tail-chasing you've saved me when I need to look up stroke order while I study the Kanji Heisig's way with only English keywords and no readings!