On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 20:42 +0000, Beartooth Sciurivore wrote > So I'm wondering : what would I have had to do? Not > uninstall Japanese from the never to be sufficiently accursed > weeds, aka language packs, that sprout ever anew in Firefox. > Obviously. In theory it should be as simple as installing the "Japanese Support" group via Yum/Pirut and then enabling that as the user's language choice in GNOME. > Can I even do anything without having to get a special keyboard? > (The present guest room computer is a laptop -- a T30 Thinkpad -- btw.) Part of the "Japanese Support" group is a package called SCIM, which is an input method that you can select with the im-chooser tool. Among other things, it allows you to type in Romaji, which is transliterated or "romanized" text, which it then will convert into various kana or kanji as applicable. (It even does cool things like word prediction based on previous entries, etc. Quite nifty). For example, if you enabled it and typed "wa", it would allow you to replace it with either the hiragana "わ" or katakana "ワ" characters, or various kanji also read as "wa." If you continued to type "tashi", then it would present you the option of the hiragana "わたし" and perhaps automatically select the kanji replacement, "私" (romaji: "watashi"; English: a very polite and formal "I" or "me"). It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's really quite nifty. :] (If you'd like you can also set it to a direct-entry keyboard layout, where each letter then becomes various kana, etc...I find that a bit more difficult to master, though.) I've just started taking Japanese classes, so I'm still quite new to it as well. Hope that helps, or at least points you in the right direction. :) -- Peter Gordon (codergeek42) GnuPG Public Key ID: 0xFFC19479 / Fingerprint: DD68 A414 56BD 6368 D957 9666 4268 CB7A FFC1 9479
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