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Not sure if this is appropriate for JL meta, but I'm having problems typing 両性愛者【りょうせいあいしゃ】 (bisexual) on the Microsoft IME. When I type りょうせいあいしゃ and press space, the following comes up: 両性愛車. When I press the right arrow, the IME selects あいしゃ as a phrase, but the correct kanji, 愛者, is not on the list for that phrase. So I have to manually delete 車 and type 者. It's a bit frustrating when I want to quickly type this word, that the correct kanji doesn't appear on the selection.

Is there a way I can modify the IME so that the kanji works correctly?

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  • nihonshock.com/2010/04/12-japanese-ime-tips and scroll down to tip 9, adding custom words. Also, after a few tries the Google IME seems to have "learned" the word for me.
    – blutorange
    Commented Feb 12, 2015 at 8:34
  • Works like a charm. If you put that as an answer and include the advice given on the link, I'll accept :)
    – Lou
    Commented Feb 12, 2015 at 8:41

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The IME has got a built-in and a custom dictionary. You can add new words to the latter. Make sure you choose the word class (noun, verb, adjective,...) correctly.

enter image description here

  1. The reading for the word. Put the hiragana in here

  2. The kanji you want to come up.

  3. Part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc.)

  4. User comment (optional)

Source

Additionally, you can try Google's IME, it works pretty well and learns from the web.

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Japanese input methods usually have functionalities to manually change the separation of the phrase. In this case, your IME tries to convert "あいしゃ" as one phrase, so you would want it to convert as "あい" + "しゃ" (or better, "どうせいあい"-"しゃ").

The actual key bindings depend on the software you use. ATOK binds left/right arrow for that. I don't use Microsoft IME myself, but Shift+Left/Right seems to work. I couldn't find a page in Microsoft's web page after a quick search, but this page explains the details (in Japanese).

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  • That's a strange link, the page comes up as meaningless symbols. And I can view kanji/kana on my computer, so it's not client-side. Anyway, I've added the custom word, so 両性愛者 converts properly now :).
    – Lou
    Commented Feb 14, 2015 at 13:10
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    @LeoKing Ah, that's a shame. I guess it is because the link does not specify the encoding it uses: please try reading the page using shift-JIS.
    – Yosh
    Commented Feb 14, 2015 at 13:37
  • I'm not sure what shift-JIS means. Anyway, if the page is in Japanese I'm not going to be able to read enough of it to be helpful, I'm only a first-year student.
    – Lou
    Commented Feb 14, 2015 at 14:16
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    I'm sorry for this mess. I hope you'll have fun learning Japanese, anyway! (For your information: shift-JIS is a character encoding, things like ASCII, UTF-8, etc..)
    – Yosh
    Commented Feb 15, 2015 at 1:54

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