sandwich wrote:

What do most real japanese people do?

According to my favourite OL, they almost all use romaji.

I've always used the standard Windows IME, meaning I type in romaji, it's converted to kana, and from there, converted to kanji.  I can now read kana almost as quickly as I can read Roman letters, and I'm not really concerned about using romaji in this one case.

As long as you make sure to not learn FROM the romaji, your reading-and-writing skills shouldn't suffer.  At the very least, whatever meager benefit the kana keyboard might offer doesn't seem to offer enough to me to justify re-learning how to type, particularly when the old kana keyboard-style is rapidly losing ground even in Japan.  To the best of my knowledge, the romaji-kana-kanji conversion is now how most Japanese people type/text message/e-mail, etc.

Last edited by dukelexon (2008 March 11, 7:03 pm)

Now if only the IME could be done with Dvorak layout I'd be set. Any suggestions in that direction from anyone?

Nukemarine wrote:

Now if only the IME could be done with Dvorak layout I'd be set. Any suggestions in that direction from anyone?

If you have Windows and are willing to make changes in the registry, you can take a look at this. It worked for me and I'm now using a custom version of Dvorak. I haven't yet found where the kana layout is set, but I have been thinking about creating my own layout and replace that too.

rich_f wrote:

I've been contemplating getting a JP keyboard-- I used one at Yamasa, and found it a lot more convenient that the constant clicking in the lower right corner to change character sets. If I do get one, will it work in US WinXP, or will I have to get  JP copy of WinXP to make everything work the way I want it to?

I'm willing to sacrifice my spacebar's size for the cause--I just want to make sure it will work.

Iirc, [alt]+[shift] switches layouts, and [alt]+[~] switches between the kana in Windows. I could be wrong, but I'm sure there's a keyboard shortcut which is a lot faster than mousing.

Caps lock + alt for katakana. Caps lock + ctrl for hiragana.

You have to do it in a series. Alt+shift (changes languages) -> alt+~ (changes from Roman to Japanese characters) -> caps lock+ctrl/caps lock+alt (changes kana)

Romaji input on a phone would be ridiculous.  My phone has two schemes, the usual cycle-through-the kana method, and the 2-key method which involves pressing one button for a column of the kana table, then another for the row (so 6-1 would be は, 6-3 would be ふ, 7-3 would be む, and so on).

I just asked a Japanese friend, and he showed me this function on excell: =PHONETIC(
In the parentheses you type the cell number that is in kanji.  unfortunately it is only in either hiragana or katakana (not both) but a huge time saver.

laner36 wrote:

I am typing sentences for my SRS.  I type out the whole sentence and then hit space bar and go through and fix the kanji that did not come up correctly.  Here`s my question:
I want to have the sentence typed in kanji and in kana (to check the answer in the SRS) without having to type the sentence twice.  Is there a way to do this?  (Either to have a sentence of kana switch to kanji or a sentence of kanji switch to kana.) When I click to copy the sentences, I can`t hit space bar and have it magically turn into kanji anymore.

If you need to mix kana forms: If you're typing in Anki in Japanese flash card mode, it will automatically convert your text + kanji to a reading in kana in the reading field, and will mix hiragana and katakana. The only downside is that sometimes it will put multiple readings for kanji in braces, so you have to delete the readings you aren't using. And if you go back to the original expression and change it, you have to re-delete the extra readings. (Which is annoying.) But you can just copy/paste out those fields as you need to into your spreadsheet.

Why not use the spreadsheet function that you described and then import the spreadsheet into Anki? Instructions for importing from spreadsheets are on the wiki.

Yes, click on deck and then export. This will give you a text file. You should be able to import that text file into your spreadsheet program as a tab-separated list of values.