There are 2 main aspects to “using” Japanese on your Windows XP machine: viewing Japanese, and writing with Japanese. It’s all very simple, and here’s how:
Firstly, basic East Asian language support
You will need:
- Windows XP CD-ROM
- local Administrator priviledges
First thing you need to do is enable, if it isn’t already, supplemental language support in the operating system. To do this, you must be an Administrator (if you’re unsure, give it a shot anyway and you’ll soon learn if you can do it or not).
- Goto ‘Control Panel’ and launch the ‘Regional and Language Options’ application.
- Select the ‘Languages’ tab and at the bottom, you will see a check box labeled: ‘Install files for East Asian languages’. Check this box and insert the Windows XP CD-ROM when you’re prompted to do so.
- Reboot.
Secondly, Japanese input
Now that the support for these languages is present on the system, you can now add the ability to input text in Windows as Japanese (including Chinese, Korean and more…). Microsoft calls these Input Method Editors (IMEs) and the steps to do that is:
- Again, launch the ‘Regional and Language Options’ application and go to the ‘Languages’ tab.
- Click the ‘Details…’ button which opens a dialog window called ‘Text Services and Input Languages’.
- You will see detailed then all the currently active/installed services in the middle of the dialog. If this area has never been configured before, you’ll probably have just 1 entry, likely English. Click the ‘Add…’ button and in the little dialog that pops up, select Japanese in the first drop-down menu box and click OK.
- At the top of the open dialog, be sure to select the ‘Default input language’ to whichever you prefer. One more configuration I recommend is to click the ‘Language Bar…’ button at the bottom and select to ‘Show the Language bar on the desktop’. The other options you can configure to taste.
And you’re done.
Toggling between input languages
Language bar input selection
When you want to switch between the input language, normally you use the language bar and select. However, one very convenient method of running through the options is to, on your keyboard, hold down the ‘Alt’ key and tap the ‘Shift’ key. You will see the language bar state rotate through each of the input locales that you selected in the previous section.
One further quick tip is that when you’re in the Japanese input locale context, to quickly switch between normal direct English text input and Hiragana/Katakana, is to hold down the ‘Alt’ key and tap the key on the upper-left hand side of the keyboard, beside the ‘1′ key. This is typically the tilda ‘~’ key. This works on most keyboards, but I can’t speak for all. Just try it out and see…
Typical character display issues
Sometimes there are problems with displaying Japanese characters even though you’ve performed the steps in the first section. This comes from the fact that not all programs are created equally and the text embedded in the program is encoded in such a way that they cannot be displayed by Windows unless you give it the correct language context, i.e. Japanese. For example, I use Office XP here at work and when I get emails with Japanese in the subject, I get a load of nonsense text. The only way to get past this is to tell Windows to interpret the text data as Japanese. It’s a pain, but there is a way out. Here is how you do it:
- Return to ‘Regional and Language Options’ application and go to the ‘Advanced’ tab.
- There is a drop-down menu there under the section entitled ‘Language for non-Unicode programs’. Select Japanese from this.
- Reboot when prompted to do so.
The one issue I take with this is that changing this setting to Japanese can have far-reaching implications to your daily use of Windows. Nothing too serious, but if for example a program is written for both English and Japanese, the Japanese will take precedence.
One more issue is web browsing. Ideally you should be using Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome to surf the web. I don’t know about Chrome, but in Firefox when you come across a Japanese page displayed as nonsense, just go to the View menu -> ‘Character Encoding’ and pick one of the 3 that are available for Japanese under the ‘More Encodings’ menu.
That’s the basics for now, I hope you find some of this useful. If you’d like a visual walkthrough for some of the above, please take a look here.
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