In order to start typing in Japanese, you should be at least somewhat familiar with the main concept of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. All shortcuts can be configured in the “System Preferences” under “Keyboard & Mouse”. That shortcut should now instead be ctrl+space. This shortcut replaces the shortcut to bring up spotlight. Press the command key and space-bar to toggle between the current and the previously used input method.This will also replace your backslash key with the Yen mark. While not necessary for displaying and inputting Japanese, some older Japanese programs may require you to set Japanese as the default language in order to function properly.

Press the F7 key after you type something to quickly change it into Katakana.If you have a Japanese keyboard, you can simply press the 半角／全角 key, also located left of the “1” key. Press the Alt and “~” keys (the tilde key left of the “1” key) to quickly switch between English and Japanese input.The Japanese input mode already allows you to switch to English so having a separate English setting is redundant and only adds more key-strokes for switching languages. It will inform you that you will need to restart to remove it completely. Simply click the “EN” English input language and click “Remove”. This is done in the same window you used to add Japanese input language. You can safely remove the English language setting.Here are a few tips that I found useful for using Japanese on the computer. Fortunately, this has become a lot easier with modern software, often only requiring setting some configuration options and in some cases, inserting the original installation disk.īelow are guides that explain the process fairly well.

Before you can fully start taking advantage of online resources, you’ll want to make sure your computer is properly configured to support Japanese.

Japanese tkeyboard