How To Change To Japanese System Locale In Windows 8.1

Setting upwardly Japanese on a Windows PC is easy every bit pie if yous follow the elementary steps below.

Android, Linux or Mac Bone Ten user? Cheque out our full Japanese reading & typing guide

Reading Japanese on Windows

If y'all have Windows Vista, 7 or 8, your reckoner is pre-arranged with Japanese fonts and everything necessary to beginning reading Japanese websites and documents with no additional setup.

If y'all nevertheless come across content which does not display correctly, endeavour following the tips below:

Websites

Most modern websites use the UTF-eight Unicode encoding, and the encoding of older sites should ordinarily exist guessed automatically by your browser.

If you withal come across squares, question marks or random character on the page, attempt irresolute the browser encoding to Shift_JIS, EUC-JP or ISO-2022-JP. Ane of these will usually solve the problem.

Google Chrome: Menu button > Tools > Encoding
IE: Right click folio > Encoding > More than

Excel

The encoding of some CSVs containing Japanese characters might be misrecognized by Excel. To fix the problem, get to the Data tab, click From Text under Go External Data, choose your file, and a window volition appear which will permit yous to choose an appropriate encoding (most of the fourth dimension it will be automatically pre-selected so you lot'll only take to click Adjacent a couple of times).

Software

All newer Japanese software should work fine on Windows with no setup necessary, but older applications (think pre-2000) might non display correctly on non-Japanese Windows. One possible solution is to:

Press the Win primal
Type 'region'
Select Region under Settings
Open the Administrative tab
Click Alter system locale…
Cull Japanese (Nihon)

Note that you must have authoritative rights to change this setting, and you lot can merely have one locale selected at a fourth dimension and so older applications in other strange languages might stop working properly.

Typing Japanese on Windows

To add a Japanese IME (Input Method) which will allow you to type in hiragana, katakana and kanji, simply follow the steps below.

Press the Win primal
Type 'input methods'
Click Modify input methods
Click Add a language
Choose Japanese

Yous can now safely remove the English setting. The Japanese input manner already allows you to type in English (Direct Input manner) and then having a dissever input method is redundant.

To quickly switch between the two modes, press Alt + ~ (the tilde central left of the 'one' key). If you lot take a Japanese computer, use the 半角／全角 key instead.

Culling Japanese IMEs

At that place are also several alternative Japanese IMEs available:

Google IME is simple to install and employ, but does not offer any benefits over the default MS IME. The main difference is that kanji autocomplete options tend to be slightly more colloquial, equally the suggestions are pulled from linguistic communication used online instead of a pre-built dictionary. The outcome is hardly noticeable however.

The input method used by most Japanese companies and preinstalled on many computers in Japan is ATOK IME. It is one of the nearly avant-garde IMEs on the marketplace, with many useful features for professionals working with Japanese on a daily footing, though they come at a steep price of about $100.

Using Windows in Japanese

A good way to practice Japanese is to use in Japanese, websites and software that you know well enough to navigate without reading every label. Facebook is a adept place to kickoff every bit you tin can utilise browser extensions such as rikaikun to speedily expect upward kanji on buttons when necessary, but as y'all get more proficient, you might want to switch the entire Windows interface as well.