Typing Tutor Program for Japanese Language

Thank you so much for your quick reply.

- I did not know realkana.This web page provides a very good way to learn Hiragana and Katakana, and all the compound Hiragana and Katakana extended characters.

Also from the same author, realkanji is a very well designed tool for testing your knowledge of Kanji characters. I will certainly use it as the Kanji are used as part of a whole sentence, and you can select the JLPT level (N1-N5) that you want to review.

However both accept only romaji input character mode, not the kana mode.

- I previously installed Typist but its intent is only to practice single US ASCII characters.

I guess, I will continue entering text in Kana mode as practice, and check for errors visually.

The most difficult was to memorize the location of the characters, which was not so difficult since the most common characters are set around the centerline.

arageo wrote:

NeverFollowJP wrote:

- I previously installed Typist but its intent is only to practice single US ASCII characters.

Did you run Typist in English? Then use Language Switcher to switch to the Japanese mode. There is "かな入力コース" to practice single hiragana characters and "かな実践コース" for sentences.

Thank you for mentioning the Language Switcher.

I have been able to lunch Typist but using the "Japanese Language" selection, this program can only work in Hiragana mode. It cannot handle Native Kana input mode... 😟

I guess, I will continue entering text in Kana mode as practice, and check for errors visually.

You might want to use OSX's keyboard viewer for your practice: Go to the language menu on the top, select Hiragana/Katakana and Show Keyboard Viewer. You can always see the kana character layout on screen as you type.

Good luck with your practice.

Thank you so much for recommending to use the Keyboard viewer.

This help for locating the keys without having to move away your hands,

and also to check which key is pressed.

I found two little strange behaviour when using the OSX's keyboard viewer:

- 1) When the keyboard is in Kana mode [かな], to be able to use Katakana characters,

instead of Hiragana, you need to click on the "caps" button.

The problem is that the OSX's keyboard viewer change the symbols of some of the keys

to displays the same characters than when pressing on the "Shift" button.

Let me explain:

In mode "Kana" (default), the button 'る' will enter the 'る' character.

In mode "Kana" and button "Shift", the button 'る' on the keyboard viewer will

change to '。' which is expected since the key will enter the '。' character.

In mode "Kana" and button "caps", the button 'る' on the keyboard viewer will

change to '。' which is WRONG since the key will enter the 'ル' character.

So the keyboard viewer should not change when pressing the "caps" button.

Note: I would prefer that when pressing the "caps" button that the keyboard viewer

display the Katakana characters instead of the Hiragana since the Katakana will be

entered when pressing a key, but this is open to discussion.

- 2) When the keyboard is in ASCII mode [英数], to be able to use Upper case characters,

instead of Lower case, you need to click on the "Shift" button.

Note: Pressing the "caps" should put you in Upper case, as any other U.S. ASCII keyboard

but instead pressing "caps" changes to Kana Mode and Katakana characters?

Well, if you press now on the ASCII mode [英数] button, then you are in ASCII Upper case mode.

Seems very complicated (May be this is a bug?)

If you then unselect the "caps" then you return to Kana mode.

You need to press again on the [英数] to return to the Ascii Lower case mode.

Note: Something is wrong anyway because will typing this line of text (which as

you can read it is in lower case) the keyboard viewer displays Upper case,

because the "caps" is on (green light on).

Ok, now If I press the "caps button" (the light goes off) to unselect the Upper case,

I am now in Hiragana mode, so I need to press the ASCII mode [英数] button to return

to lower case.

So what do you think? For the (1) the Keyboard viewer doesn not display the expected character

and in (2) the "caps" switch to Kana mode instead of Upper case.

I am using the external Japanese Bluetooth Apple keyboard, and may be laptops with internal Kana

keyboards will not present thoses two strange behaviour.

Do you think that this should be reported as bugs?

- If so, what is the process to send a bug notification to Apple?