Way to type Kanji / Hiragana on English keyboards?

Official Memrise Courses Japanese
1

I was wondering if there was a way to type in this characters using English keyboards? At present it seems like there is mostly digital buttons, and less physical key presses.

2

There are IMEs (Imput Method Editors) like Google’s and Microsoft’s.

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3

I use MS IME a lot and it works quite well. But I don’t know how type the symbols for long vowels ( like a long dash) neither know how to write the little version of ‘tsu’ to indicate a shorter vowel. Does anyone know?

4

Ok, I just found out. To write little hiragana simply type an l first. The other keys I mentioned can be reached using - and ~ (ß and ° on a german keyboard).

5

I will assume you have installed the Japanese IME on your pc. (If not, https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/how-to-install-japanese-keyboard/). In Windows 10, a language icon will show on the bottom of your screen. (I often have to click on the Japanese icon to make input mode use Hiragana.

  • You can use the “alt + caps” to switch back and forth from Japanese to English. You can also use the <windows key + space> to switch between languages.
  • to type the small half-height characters, there are two ways to do that: (using the Windows IME and enabling Japanese keyboard)
  1. For example, to type “chotto”, you type “cho”, which gives you ちょ, then hit the ‘t’ key twice then type the rest of ‘tsu’, for っつ. So, ちょっと,
  2. You can also type an ‘x’ just before the ‘tsu’, to get the ‘half-height’ effect. Using xtsu and tsu: っつ. In that case you have to type both the characters.

I am still learning myself. There are other short-cuts but these are the main ones. If you find others, please add them. (There’s probably some web page that has everything but I haven’t found the like yet.) Thanks.

6

Hello @pfs32

See if you can use alt + tilde - it’s the key to the left of “1” - to switch between Hiragana and alphanumeric. It works for me.

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7

Hello @rgrafint
To type " ー " I use the - key (left of the equals key).
For example:
I type: “o” + “-” + “ke” + “-” + space. IME outputs “オーケー”.

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8

Thanks. That works for me also on Windows 10. That was a major irritant. Thanks, again!

9

Press the Alt and “~” keys (the tilde key left of the “1” key) to quickly switch between English and Japanese input . If you have a Japanese keyboard , you can simply press the 半角／全角 key, also located left of the “1” key. Press the F7 key after you type something to quickly change it into Katakana!

10

You’re right. I was using the numpad minus to get quite the same however it wasn’t working…
I had the issue with a few case like in : やった－！
which is found in Japanese 0 chapter 5 (https://www.memrise.com/course/2020826/japanese-0/5/)

Reason being that if you use the minus mark on the numpad you’d get this Unicode character:
－ full width hyphen-minus (65293)
Instead of
ー katakana-hiragana prolonged sound mark (12540)

You’re post helped me fixing the problem, thanks :slight_smile:

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