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Posts Tagged ‘ime’

How to use a drawing tablet and Windows XP writing pad IME to write Japanese and Mandarin characters with autosuggest

2012/02/04 2 comments
  1. Our small group work spaces each now have a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet installed.
  2. You can use these tablets in conjunction with the Windows XP writing pad IME to input Mandarin/Kanji character strokes and receive autosuggest options you can pick you character from which make not only writing faster, but also reward you for remembering your characters, expose you to more and help you identify the correct one from a list of options.
  3. Here is what the Windows XP writing pad IME and Wacom tablet looks like in action: (behind the pen: our Japanese tutor).
  4. Here is how to access Windows XP Japanese IME keyboard and handwriting:
    1. Open the application you want to write in, e.g. MS Word (the language input option is specific to the current window and defaults to”English-US international”  in the LRC if you open a new window).
    2. In the taskbar, in the language toolbar section, select Japanese or Chinese or Korean.
    3. If only the language identifier is showing in the language toolbar, right-click on it and choose “Show additional icons”
    4. Select as input method for the chosen language from icon “Options” or “Tools”” , the “IME pad” / “Handwriting”
    5. Prerequisites
        1. you need to have the handwriting IME installed for Japanese or  Chinese or Korean in Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Text Input, and East Asian language support).
        2. For simplified Chinese, the IME Pad may not be checked to be displayed by default. Access the Tools icon menu to check it.
        3. For both simplified and traditional Chinese, if checked, the IME Pad becomes a separate top-level ion in the language bar.
        4. Some screenshots may help:

      korean-ime-pad-enable  chinese-simplified-ime-pad-enablechinese-simplified-ime-pad chinese-traditional-ime-pad

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Intermediate, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Near-Native, Videos, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

Pinyin Input: An Input Method Editor (IME) for Learners of Mandarin

2011/01/13 Leave a comment

Maybe the two biggest challenges for beginning Western non-native learners of Mandarin are:

  1. Mandarin is a tonal language (like e.g. Vietnamese);
  2. Mandarin has a non-alphabetic script (mainland China “simplified” theirs, as opposed to Taiwan and other “traditional” Chinese communities, while e.g. Vietnam has Romanized the writing system).
    A common workaround, when starting to learn Mandarin, is first using only Pinyin, one of the Romanized phonetic transcription systems for spoken Mandarin which includes special markers for the most common 5 tones.

Typing the tone markers on a PC needs a special program. A number of tone marker input editors are available (see PinyinJoe’s list). I have used and supported PinyInput, which works similarly to Pinyin input IMEs used by native speaking PC users. Instead of offering, in a popup window, Mandarin script when typing with an alphabetic keyboard, PinyInput offers tone markers.

A 1-minute screencast hopefully says more than 1000*fps*duration words: Watch this PinyInput demo.

Categories: e-languages Tags: , , , ,

Swift-TX subtitling with Windows XP Japanese IME

2010/11/24 Leave a comment

In order to get Swift to work with Japanese , you have to set the font in the swift preferences:

This computer worked –

 

meaning: IME showing up here.

”Input mode” must be set to Hiragana, not “direct input” which (if I recall correctly think) we did in XP/ control panel/ “regional and language settings”.

We could replicate getting it to work on other XP computers:

by resetting of the “input mode” from “direct input” to “hiragana”,

 

AND after a restart of switch and opening a new swift file:

 

Next problem:

when you use ctrl up/down arrow , spurious spaces appear between letters.

Categories: Japanese, Translation Tags: , , ,