I'm thinking of switching to a mac. Are there any averse consequences to my Japanese study i.e. Anki problems etc. Is it worth it to get windows installed on it too. Sorry to take this away from kanji and japanese.....also is it hard to switch to kana typing?

MacOS X's in-built support for non-European scripts is superb. Typing is very easy. I have briefly tested Anki and it was running smoothly (I subsequently dumped it but not for anything system-related).

jpeg support is broken in anki for mac. if you don't have jpeg images in your decks, anki is great on osx (i'm using it on both osx and windows and it looks and feels much better on osx).

Japanese support is great: typing's easy and you can search J-text in Spotlight. I also use Anki, JEDict, write in Japanese, etc all with no trouble. And my system never crashes (run those maintenance scripts!).

this man has some interesting comments

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/...=macs_cant

i particulary like his iphone commentary.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

not particulary work friendly but highly ammusing.

katsuo is the Mac man. Perhaps he has some words of wisdom for you. Personally, I'm still happy with my PowerBook 3 years after purchase (got the educational discount coz I'm an English "teacher"). Don't use Anki myself though. Perhaps purchasing in Japan would be the best idea? That way you'd get a lovely Japanese keyboard too. Switching to input JP/English text is very straight forward. There is one button to press if you want Western characters and another for JP. One drawback is that the computer is either in JP or Western input mode. As opposed to Windows where you can have different Windows happily inputting different text. I don't have Windows running on my mac. Not had a need for it. Changing the system language on the fly is also a piece of cake.

Go for it. I had far more problems trying to get my old windows computer to read and type Japanese. My mac handles it without any trouble and it's dead simple to switch between languages. As for Anki, it's worked perfectly for me thus far, though I don't use images on it.

(Also despite what's mentioned above it is possible to just use Japanese input in one window and English in another.)

Oh, that anti-Mac page is hilarious. I don't get the fanboys, and Steve Jobs, like all middle-aged pale guys, needs to ditch the black turlenecks and jeans. Ugh!

I used PCs for years and switched so my OS would be more stable-- it is-- but I think my next computer will just be something cheap I can run Ubuntu on or something. I get annoyed by the fact that osx holds my hand as much as it does, so maybe if I can teach myself unix I can make the change. My ages-old Powerbook is now held together with tape, and the keyboard curls. Still works, though.

And speaking as someone who has 1)seen the awesome power of Japanese phones, and 2)never bought one, I think anyone who drops 500 bucks on an iPhone is nuts. Also not really work safe: http://achewood.com/?date=05182006

And btw, Synewave, what os are you running? I can have Japanese in JEdict and English in Anki simultaneously, it's not either-or, running 10.4.10.

billyclyde Wrote:And btw, Synewave, what os are you running? I can have Japanese in JEdict and English in Anki simultaneously, it's not either-or, running 10.4.10.

Yeah, I do have 10.4.10. You're right Sure this didn't used to be the case though.

I suppose it's my own fault for using Firefox. I suppose it's logical the tabs are going to have the same input setting.

Not exactly on topic, but I've got a mac powerbook and for some reason when I try post to this site using kanji or kana they show up in the message box, but in the actual post they show as question marks. I'm using firefox and I did download greasemonkey. My tech skills are zilch. Thank you.

Laura Wrote:Not exactly on topic, but I've got a mac powerbook and for some reason when I try post to this site using kanji or kana they show up in the message box, but in the actual post they show as question marks. I'm using firefox and I did download greasemonkey. My tech skills are zilch. Thank you.

The most likely cause would be using the wrong text encoding. I don't use Firefox anymore, but if you set it to Japanese (autodetect) it should work fine.

Jarvik7 Wrote:The most likely cause would be using the wrong text encoding. I don't use Firefox anymore, but if you set it to Japanese (autodetect) it should work fine.

Or failing that, you might want to try Japanese (Shift_JIS).

View > Character Encoding > 'Japanese (Shift_JIS)'