Japanese language learning
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Advice on how to write Japanese

Japanese teachers will be aware of the difficulties presented by using the three Japanese syllabarys together with Latin text to show vocabulary and phrase examples. These problems can become greater on the net when attempting to convey kanji to computers not configured to read it. Furthermore when one has a Japanese IME installed on the computer it can be rather a nuisance constantly resetting it away from the script it thinks you want to write in; in fact this whole work was prepared without a Japanese IME as a result of this and other bugs presented to my computer when it was installed.  A simple change of font is all that is required when using this system.  The following advice on how to write Japanese in gaigana is to help you keep things simple.

• When making vocabulary or phrase lists, do these in simple tables. You can then select a whole gaigana column and change the font.
• If you do want to mix Japanese words and phrases directly into English text then go to the quick styles menu in your word processor and add gaigana as a ‘new style’ with the size of the font adjusted to display text most complimentary to your chosen ‘English’ font.  Now when you select text, it is a single mouse click to format it as gaigana.
• The gaigana font is a first edition and may look underweight compared to some ‘English’ fonts.  Setting it a little scaled up as a ‘User style’ option, also helps in this regard.
• When you are printing documents into popular formats such as .pdf, remember you need to embed any non standard font ( If printing to Adobe pdf this can be done in the Print/properties area with ‘Do not send fonts to pdf’ box unticked).

Next New section on how to write Japanese symbols and punctuation

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