My wife is Japanese. We have XP Pro SP2. I have the install disc. We can read Japanese just fine on web pages by going through "encoding," but my wife want to be able to type in Japanese.
Does anyone know how to do that? Do I need to buy a product? Does microsoft have a free download? She is wanting to type in Yahoo mail (not as important to be able to do it in Office 2007).
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
For Chinese anyways: Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options Select "Install files for East Asian languages" (I think) Click Details Then "Add" and select whatever IME you require. You may also wish to examine the Advanced tab.
It looks like Windows XP does include a Japanese IME when I double-check that, although I obviously cannot vouch for how good it is.
Posted by erosomniac (Member # 6834) on :
Mucus has the right of it, and the XP Japanese IME is actually surprisingly good.
Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :
Ok, I installed it. How do I go about accessing it so I can type?
Thank you very much by the way!
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
Back on the Details dialog that you used to add the Japanese IME, there are two Preference buttons at the bottom. You can use those to activate the language bar and setup a hot key to switch via the keyboard.
Posted by C3PO the Dragon Slayer (Member # 10416) on :
Wow. How do you type Japanese characters anyway? (I'm not asking about software; I'm asking about keyboards and typing.) Any form of ASCII would be horrendously tedious; I'm not aware of any possible divisions of individual characters that would make it easy, and I don't know of any keyboards that have all the characters on them. How is this solved practically?
Posted by erosomniac (Member # 6834) on :
Are you talking about typing Japanese on a Japanese keyboard, or typing Japanese on an English keyboard?
If the former, I've never seen a Japanese keyboard that doesn't have a complete set of alphabet keys. If the latter, you type in roomanji.
Posted by Sergeant (Member # 8749) on :
I've never used the Japanese IME but I have used the Korean version and it is quite impressive. It even allows you to type in the syllable and then select Hanja (like kanji in Japanese) characters that match that syllable. I would imagine that the Japanese IME does the same as I understand the Japanese use more Kanji and the Koreans use Hanja.
I always used a standard US keyboard and just had to remember were the keys were for the Korean letters.
To shift between the "EN" language setting and the Japanese you press ALT + SHIFT. Then there should pop up a couple of buttons in the language bar. If it is like the Korean IME you can switch between typeing latin characters according to the standard US keyboard layout and Japanese/Korean just by pressing one of those buttons.
At one point I had my keyboard set to type English, Korean and Russian. Anytime someone else was using it and accidently hit ALT + SHIFT it would freak them out
![[Smile]](smile.gif)