Hi! I hope I can find an answer here so I don’t need to wait forever for replies on microsoft forums.
I was trying to create some japanese learning sheets to later convert into Anki cards (I still don’t know how to do it but I am confident it is possible), and I really need to be able to get the (Hiragana) Furigana of a column of Kanji.
I found the phonetic function, installed the japanese langauge to use it, and it does not work as intended: when I type =phonetic(cell) I get the kanji itself as an output, instead of the furigana. Furthermore, if I change the target cell content (the one that contains the kanji) and type in some hiragana instead, the function will now output the katakana reading, even if I revert the content to kanji instead of hiragana.
I guess I should change some formatting options but it’s all in japanese and I don’t know much computer vocabulary.
Thank you in advance!
2 comments
Unfortunately, the way that PHONETIC works is that it requires you to input the kanji using the IME directly into the Excel spreadsheet, so that the program can use that input to record how the kanji are supposed to be read. If you copy-and-paste the kanji into Excel, it won’t have this additional information and won’t work.
Could they have written it to guess using a dictionary? Sure, probably, but then it’d get some people’s names wrong, and they’d have to deal with all of those complaints.
As for converting hiragana to katakana, it does this presumably because spellings that are specifically supposed to be phonetic are traditionally given in katakana — see, for example, any monolingual pitch accent dictionary.
edit: add a point
Use Anki to add furigana (japanese support addon), not excel.
Also to convert, you copy paste your excel sheet in a note, in text format. You import that file in Anki. A column will be a field, a line will be a card.