Additional Language Support: Mac OS X

I studied Japanese for two and a half years while I was in college and lived in Japan for one of those years as an exchange student. Many of my Japanese friends know English, but sometimes I want to communicate with them in their mother tongue. Thankfully, with my MacBook Pro, adding additional input languages is a pretty simple task. Here’s how to do it:

Open System Preferences and choose “Language & Text.”

In the “Language & Text” screen, click on the “Input Sources” tab.

In the box on the left-hand side, make sure to select the checkbox next to “Keyboard & Character Viewer.” This will put an option in the tool bar at the top of your screen so that you can easily select your preferred input language. After enabling the viewer and while you are still in the “Input Sources” tab, choose whatever languages you want to enable. In this case, I am enabling Kotoeri with sub-options for Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji. Now, when I click on the American flag that populates in the toolbar, I can choose any of these as my input option on the fly, switching between Japanese and English as needed.

Unlike Windows, enabling additional languages is quite simple with Mac OS X because the languages are already there, and you don’t have to install support for them separately. Follow these steps and soon you’ll be writing things like this: この日本語を書くことについてページを読んでてありがとうございます。また来てください。