Flowers on sale at a local outdoor market in Taiwan.The following is probably how Westerners type in Japanese and I have yet to experiment more to find out how the Japanese themselves type. When I originally learned to type in Chinese on a PC, I familiarized myself with a "Romaji" (Roman letters) approach that was what the foreigners learned because it was based on the Roman alphabet, but it was not the same as my Chinese friends' approach, which, although based on sounds, was related to the Mandarin phonetic symbols used in Taiwan and which required that different keys be pressed to obtain the different letters.
To complete this exercise, you ideally need a Mac computer. Of course there are ways of typing in Japanese on a PC, but I am no computer expert and I now have a Mac. Macs are expensive, but in my opinion they are better for this kind of thing, just as there is a difference between driving a BMW and an "economy" car.
Typing Japanese has become a lot easier than I thought:
1) Go to Google and type the words "typing Japanese on a Mac". There are many good sites, but I chose the following [PDF] Japanese Text Input Guide for Mac OS X (which came up as the second entry and had to do with the following site: library.wcc.hawaii.edu/Computers/Tips_Japanese_Input.pdf ). If you click on the entry, you can download a 3-page PDF file which serves as a guide for learning how to input Japanese text. It is very easy to follow.
By following the simple steps, I ended up with a blank Microsoft Word file, and a "palette" on the left side of my screen in which all the Hiragana symbols as well as punctuation appeared.
With the Hiragana symbol showing near the top right-hand corner of my screen (instead of the US flag to show that I am intending to type Japanese and not English), I started typing the following examples (typing the Roman letters you can see to the right of the Japanese) by copying from an elementary textbook:
ありがとうございます (arigatou gozaimasu "thank you")
I tried the following more complicated sentence (since it includes Katakana (for place names) and one Kanji character:
The idea was to type "igirisu no rondon kara kimashita" (which means "I'm from London in England"). So here goes (still in Hiragana mode):
いぎりす came out as the first four characters, but it should be in Katakana. Instead of choosing the Katakana mode and retyping, simply hit the space bar, and continue typing, and do the same with the word for London:
イギリスのロンドンからきました。(I got the "period" symbol off the palette, which is easier at this stage).
The trained eye will notice that the Japanese will normally replace the き symbol with the kanji character 来 meaning "to come". To get this to appear will require hitting the space button in the right place:
イギリスのロンドンから来ました。
The right place is at the end of the sentence (at least through trial and error). I guess the computer has to see complete words before it can judge whether a Hiragana symbol needs to be changed to something else. It is a little like an ongoing spelling checker in English. I know from English, however, that the computer sometimes changes something in a way that we don't want, so we have to be careful to check everything.
Anyway, what I learned from this exercise is that there is no mystery to typing Japanese on a computer. How things have changed since I started studying Chinese 30 years ago, which involved buying a dictionary and spending hours looking everywhere for those elusive characters.
Of course, while using a computer can be a lot of fun and easier when writing in Japanese, this does not mean we should not learn how to write by hand. I will share my experience of how I practiced writing the Hiragana and Katakana symbols in another posting. I will also write a short post about how to choose the right kanji symbol if and when the computer is in doubt about which one you intend to use. That is also explained on the above 3-page document.
Finally, if you like me think that you can't type Japanese because your computer does not give you that option, then buy a computer that does. In the end the investment will be well worth it.
