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Once you've enabled Japanese input on your computer, you can use the language bar (Windows) or keyboard menu (Macintosh) to Japanese. When you start typing now, all of your words will be underlined with a dashed line. Use the standard Hepburn system romanizations to input words.
e.g. Type: n i h o n => にほん
If you want the word to appear in hiragana, then hit the enter key to accept the displayed characters and the dashed line will disappear.
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There are some characters that don't have one standard romanization or whose romanizations don't work with the accepted input. Here are some of the quick ways of typing some of those funny characters.
Character | Input |
を | wo |
ん | nn |
ー(katakana long vowel) | hyphen key |
「 」 (quotation marks) | [ ] (bracket keys) |
づ | du |
ぢ | di |
ぁ ぃ っ... (small kana) | xa xi xtsu ... |
かった (small tsu) | katta |
・ | / (slash key) |
ウィ | wi |
ティ | thi |
ヴィ | vi |
ディ | dhi |
ヴ | vu |
ゑ | we |
ゐ | wi |
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However, there are some handy add-on tools that you'll want to know about and make use of. These include the ability to add phonetic guide (i.e. furigana) to characters, use enclosed characters, write vertically and others. For more information about these and other handy features for Japanese computing, see my page on Additional Tools for Japanese.
Internet Searching
Google (is there really anything else?), has some built-in language prefrence tools that allows you to search in both English and Japanese automatically.
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I recommend using Thunderbird for email. While Outlook may work, it is a constant target for virus and spyware writers, and therefore not a safe email client to use. You can download Thunderbird at www.mozilla.com.See my page on Multilingual Settings for Thunderbird for details on how to set your default encoding options.
Macintosh
Mac's built-in email client, called Mail.app, is a wonderful email client and works great with most languages (the exceptions are RTL languages, like Hebrew and Arabic). I highly recommend using it for your email.
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