Typing in Japanese on a Mac

Typing in Japanese, or any other language, is easy when you know where to go. The first thing is to open the System Preferences and click the icon of a flag. On some computers its called "International," on others "Language and Text," but either way this is what it looks like:

Once into the Language and Text screen, click on the tab at the labeled "Input Sources." There'll be a list of languages you can choose. Check the box for "Kotoeri." Hiragana, katakana, and romaji should be the only ones you'll need, so make sure they're checked, as they are below:

Once you've checked a language, a little American flag will appear in the bar at the top of your computer screen. Clicking that flag gives you the option to change to one of the Kotoeri scripts, hiragana, katakana, or romaji.

Most typing in Japanese can be done with the hiragana option. Hitting the return key after typing a phrase will leave the phrase in hiragana, but hitting the space bar will change the phrase into kanji. Hitting the space bar again will let you scroll through the possible kanji and pick the one you want. Even if you're typing a katakana word, typing it in hiragana and hitting the space bar will change it to katakana.

There are a lot of other scripts in the Input Sources to choose from. Apart from Japanese, I usually use Russian, which gives you the option of either using the keys as they would be set up on an actual Russian keyboard, or typing phonetically in the Russian alphabet.