Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Typing in Japanese!

こんばんは!

(If my hearty "good evening" above just looks like a bunch of rectangles or question marks, then you need some help installing Japanese character sets.)

Nana and I finally caved in and got iPhones last week. Language learning was a huge part of the decision: there's no real substitute for carrying a huge dictionary, a big stack of customizable flashcards, and pretty much the whole Internet on a device that fits in your pocket. Plus, typing in Japanese on the thing is totally cool. You can even draw in kanji - provided you know the stroke order, and you don't have stupid fat fingers like mine.

Anyway, after futzing around with the Japanese on my iPhone for a while, I realized that there had to be some way to do the same thing with my laptop. Luckily, it turns out that adding input languages is a lot easier now than it was back in my days of trying to get Korean in Windows XP.

I won't go into detail - YesJapan has an excellent guide. All in all, it took less than ten minutes, and now I can write in Japanese!

Today's Japanese Lesson:

こんばんは
kon ban wa
"This evening [topic]"
Good evening!


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