Japanese Input Support For Western OSes?

RobM asks: "I'm currently studying Japanese, both for fun (Anime) and for profit (possible employement in Japan). To be able to better learn the language, I was planning to use my PC to read Japanese pages and then to manually translate them using one or more of the open Japanese dictionaries available. To be able to input the Kanjis I have to add to the system a Kanji input method and the related software , but none of the western distro has support for this. Moreover, there are a lot of tools for similar tasks, many of which are poorly documented and/or very old." How do the more common Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.) compare when it comes to Japanese support?

Comments

Chinese Input ...

[mbyte]

I don't know for japanese, but for the Win32 Platforms with IE (5.0 or 5.5) there are additional input methods (such as pinyin, etc) to type chinese characters. Just install the correct IME (it shoud go with IE), and select it from your keyboard prefs.

(Works fine with win2k German and chinese keyboard ;)


Samba Information HQ

Romaji based input

[fosh]

I am not sure how far along you are in your study of japanese, so this may be new, or not.

In Japanese, every "sound" can be created by stringing together charectars in the core alphabet (also known as hiragana) which consists of 40 something charectars. Kanji's are pictures which are equivelent to one or more hiragana, depending on thier context. For example:

The Word JAPAN is: (individual hiragana charectars are seperated by spaces)
ni ho n

It is comprised of two kanji's. Sun, and book.
Sun == ni
book == hon

I.E. Japan == Sun (Kanji) + Book (Kanji) == ni + hon.

However, there is one little wrinkle here, the kanji's can change thier pronunciation (and sometimes meaning) depending on thier context.

I.E. Monday
Monday == Sun (Kanji) + Day Of Week (kanji)

But, in this case,
Monday == ni chi
(in case you are curious, Day of Week == yobii)

To remedy this situation, most westerners input japanese by inputting the sounds, and then choosing kanji's for them once they are input. (The computer has a database of hiragana->kanji).

This is do-able through many many packages for linux and Windows. Check out the MULE package.

As for looking up Kanji's you see, this is done by stroke order and radicals. The Japanese language is extremely modular, and mosr complex Kanji are made up of sevral radicals. When looking them up, you give the dictionary a few radicals and it gives you a list. There is an excellent palm program for this (Called Hanabi,) and sevral linux programs, such as gjiten and jdict.

Finally, there is an extremely cool Kanji handwriting recognition project for linux called kanjipad. It is a stand alone program as well as a widget, However it is very very difficult to draw Kanji with a mouse.

Good Luck in you Quest! (ganbatte)
--Alex Fishman

Re:Japanese on various operating systems

[trog9000]

First, the online reference of choice for Japanese computing...Jim Breen's web site and ftp archive (or a mirror).

For western Win32 versions before win2k, i think you are limited to things like this hack from MS for IE5, which allows CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) input in IE5, Word2000, and Outlook, or to using apps which handle the language on their own.

For X (should apply to most versions/most *nix variants), you need fonts (included with XFree86, possibly in one of the optional font packages), an Input Method (IM) like kinput2 and a kana-kanji conversion server like Canna or WNN. You probably also will need localized variants of many apps, kterm for xterm, jvim for vi/vim, etc. Recent Emacs should work, look for 'International Character Set Support' in the emacs info pages for details. Mozilla handles display fairly well, though i haven't messed with setting it up for input yet. XJDIC (or a variant) rounds out the list of things to get, providing a nice Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary.

Kon2 handles using CJK from the linux console (also possibly BSD and others), haven't used it in a while though, so don't really remember how well it worked.

Many Thanks!

[RobM]

To expand on my problems (and on my level of knowledge), I know a little japanese (some grammar, hiragana and katakana and very few kanjis).

I'd like to be able to use a computer dictionary to speed up my 'reading time' of a Japanese web page, and with that improve my understanding of the language using real world examples of it. Using the dictionary I can copy-paste the kanji in the right place in the dictionary program, and avoid the long search time on a paper dictionary (I do have a very good memory for symbols, but I need to be able to do something "interesting" while studying, or I get bored :)

I've already tried kinput2 on a SuSE 6.4 with KDE 1.1, but with little success: when the kinput2 is active and configured (I've used cannaserver), nothing happens even with the kterm (self compiled) or with the Kanji dictionaries.

Maybe SuSE's X isn't compiled for extended input methods? Or maybe kinput2 doesn't work with XFree 4.0? Guess I'll have to check specfiles and docs for X.

I'll also check the various link you provided me for answers to my dilemmas ;), many thanks again!

Ciao,
Roberto.