It’s really annoying that switching to Japanese IME defaults me to romanji instead of hiragana. The whole reason anyone switches to using Japanese input is to type in Japanese, why Microsoft would default to romanji is beyond my understanding.
Anyone know how to force it to default to English or get rid of romanji input all together? If I wanted to type using English alphabet I’d switch back to the actual English input method, not have the Japanese IME constantly switching back to it automatically when I’m trying to type in Japanese for an extended period of time.
5 comments
I don’t know the answer, But you can switch to Hiragana by pressing Alt+Caps Lock, It less annoying that way
I’m not the most tech savvy so I can’t answer the main question but hopefully I can shed light on a tangential topic, the demographic using romaji vs kana input.
When I learned to type Japanese on computers in Japan, we used romaji input primarily. Possibly because it was the default… and Japanese students only start learning to use computers in late high school back then so changing the default was never really handy.
The ones who favour hiragana input tend to be the people who learned to type on a Japanese typewriter before windows 95 became a thing.
Just just the Japanese IME as default. When you want to type English, use A, when you want to type Japanese, switch to あ.
You can change in the settings that it should remember your last selected mode, or always start with a specific mode.
Right click and open the settings. Don’t habe my pc on me right now, so can’t help more than that.
Yeah, if there’s one thing over the years that I’ve noticed, it’s that Microsoft’s Japanese IME is a bit naff. Depending on your use case, you might be able to use [Google’s own IME](https://www.google.co.jp/ime/). It’s been used on many of their services over the years, and it’s quite simple and easy to use. That said, I don’t think it solves your immediate problem; it does still do the input swap on different windows, but it is just a click away, and it keeps that window’s input selection as needed.
Honestly, I’m not sure what else to suggest. It could be some other sort of IME, but I think it’s more down to how fundamentally weird Microsoft’s input is normally.