Jisho.org Forum

On a Mac you just go activate the language in System Preferences (you have 50 keyboards or so, out of the box).
And you can keep different input sources for different applications. Quite useful, when you use more than 2 languages.

Vista eh? There's always this.

Possibly you've sorted it all out by now, but just in case you didn't know...

When you type in 'nihongo' and it appears on the screen as 'にほんご', you have to press the space bar to turn it into '日本語'. Sometimes you'll get a choice if there's more than one possible word.

Just the space bar bit wasn't that obvious for me when I first started typing Japanese.

Although you'd write 話します ;)

Posted By: Aj

[quote]

Posted By: asmodai

[p]Although you'd write 話します ;)[/p]

[p]If i wanted to write it in kanji, i did not.[/p][/quote]

There's really not much choice in the matter, some words are supposed to be written in kanji while some are not. Some can be but often aren't. While you could write your whole sentences in kana, no one would want to read them.

"Hiragana = Original Japanese characters, Katakana = borrowed words, Kanji = Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese.. sore dake da."

No... hiragana and katakana were both derived from kanji.

Couple of mistakes there - 豚肉 is pork not pig, sports is スポーツ.

Although most learners first learn that katakana = borrowed words, this is not entirely true. e.g. たばこ is often written in hiragana (originally a loan-word), ケータイ (cellphone) is commonly written in katakana these days although it came from a kanji compound. Katakana has many other uses than foreign words. Probably the better "broad" statement is that katakana = sound rather than meaning, and therefore is often used for emphasis, indication of accents in dialogue, sound effect words, etc.

かわいい can be written in kanji (可愛いい), and many words which are in kanji have readings that are Japanese - e.g. きょう (今日) has a reading which is from Japanese, and kanji which were taken from Chinese and are used for their meaning. Another interesting example is shorthand kanji for countries, e.g. 露 is used for "Russia" as it has the sound ろ and Russia is ロシア in katakana.

It is best, when using an input method, to avoid converting to kanji if you're not sure of which of the options is correct. You can get some weird sentences that way. Some IMEs have little tips that come up explaining the difference (in Japanese, though).

It is acceptable to write in all-kana if you need to, although you might want to space it out to make it easier to read. It does look childish, and you should use the kanji you know, of course, but better than writing 浣腸 when you meant　官庁！