how does one type in hiragana and katakana? symbol wise. this isnt fair -.- - Feed Post by Jayriv
how does one type in hiragana and katakana? symbol wise. this isnt fair -.-
posted by Jayriv
Comments 9
An onscreen keyboard is only good if you don't have a keyboard, or if you aren't allowed to change any settings on the computer you are using (i.e. school/work computer). Otherwise, just you should use your keyboard. The keyboard can be any type of keyboard, don't need a Japanese one at all!
The best choice is probably to get Google's Japanese language input, which is quick to install and the easiest to use:
http://www.google.co.jp/ime/download.html
The actual software is in English, however the download page is only in Japanese. The download button is "同意してインストール" (meaning "agree and install"). The checkbox is for if you want to automatically send usage statistics and crash reports, so can just leave that unticked if you want.
It should download and then install itself pretty much automatically. Once installed, it will appear at the bottom of your screen on the language bar where you can switch between English and Japanese, and choose hiragana, katakana, etc. Just click where you want to type, choose "hiragana", then start typing romaji and it will turn into hiragana. ^^
thats pretty sweet dude. thanks so much. do you have any suggestions on learning the kanji as well? if i see the ones ive learned, i usually know what they mean, however i rarely remember the kunyomi for them. and i can picture them, but i cant write them.. weird.. but thats how it is for me. any suggestions?- ありがと ございます （：
- まよずみ に いま。。。。。。。。
- Well, when typing on a computer, you just write out the word in hiragana then press spacebar to convert it to kanji. It first guesses which kanji you want, but if it isn't correct just press spacebar again and select the correct kanji from the list. The list is sorted with most common words at the top, so for basic words it should either guess correct first time or be near the top of the list.
For knowing which kanji to chose from the conversion list, learn the meanings of lots of kanji. I wouldn't worry too much about individually memorising loads of kunyomi, you start picking stuff like that up almost automatically after a while. ^^
For writing on paper, I haven't really done much of that so I can't really help much.
I'm sure stroke order is important:
http://www.tofugu.com/guides/guess-kanji-stroke-order/
And radicals are very important for memorising kanji and their meanings, but they're probably also important when drawing kanji as they're the building blocks of kanji:
http://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Japanese_kanji_radicals 
It depends on what type of computer you are on, windows or mac... i think these days if you go into the language settings or keyboard settings i think you should be able to turn on japanese keyboard, then you have to switch between english and japanese keyboard
try typing them out a lot and looking at Japanese words you are familiar with written in hiragana and katakana like wolf for example: オオ-カ-ミ witch is o-ka-mi you may notice 2 オ[O](s) that I put in Japanese this is because okami has an prolonged O that is also shown in romaji by an o with a line over it that I don't know how to wright on a computer, I can easily read remember and wright okami in katakana as well as the individual kana characters my advise is to become familiar with a ton of words and then study them in different ways so you can know all 4 ways of weightings and thus also learn the individual characters, a perfect and simple example of this is の witch is "no" it is often used as "of" and most people know it because of its vary common use any ways hope that helped its the best way to learn then with meaning- Oh wow, there's now an English download page and English installer for Google Japanese Input! I never managed to find it before, but I guess Google finally realised it's not just Japanese speakers who want it but also learners of the language too. Here's the link to the English download page:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/japaneseinput/eula.html
This makes it even easier to show people how to get it. :)
