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

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