It took me a minute to figure out what had gone wrong here, especially since the prompt is incorrect for this mistake. But I’m not sure how I actually managed to input this.
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Capital letters are converted into katakana. You capitalised the first letter.
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Ooh I see, thanks. That has never happened to me before, I’m not sure how I managed to press shift.
Seems like something that should get its own prompt if it’s an easy mistake to make, then. Upon testing, on a word without ん, if you use katakana it just gets marked wrong flat out. So I would think, either they should make words with ん not give this prompt if you have katakana in your input, or add a katakana prompt that supercedes it 
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i did this, actually! my first wrong answer was when i typed “Ichi” instead of “ichi”
also, i recently got the enlightened status on issen too
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x does the same thing: xo results in ぉ. You also have combinations with ‘h’ which can be useful for some katakana words, for instance if you want to type ティ you can’t type ‘ti’ since that will be parsed as チ, you can either type ‘teli’ or ‘texi’ or, one character shorter, ‘thi’.
I’m having quite a lot of fun playing with Japenese IMEs frankly, it’s a bit arcane at first but it’s so flexible. I like how it effectively doubles as an emoji keyboard since I can just describe something and the IMO will propose all sorts of relevant icons and emojis on top of the usual kanji completion.
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I wonder if a Shift or Cap Lock converts to Katakana in a real IME? So far, Microsoft IME and Google Japanese Input don’t work that way.
Auto-capitalization doesn’t exist in the IME’s either, as long as Kana are eventually output’d.
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I use Mozc on linux and by default it uses the Fx keys to convert to various scripts:
F６：にほん
F７：ニホン
F８：ﾆﾎﾝ
F９：ｎｉｈｏｎｎ/ＮＩＨＯＮＮ/Ｎｉｈｏｎｎ
F１０：nihonn/NIHONN/Nihonn
Then there’s space for the usual kanji conversion and TAB for completion.
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This works for Windows too. I have never tried those.
Mozc supposedly uses the open-source component of Google Japanese Input (which is my IME of choice). (And luckily my laptop defaults to Fx rather than fn.)
I normally use Alt + Cap Lock, though.
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I use a heavily customized keyboard layout that doesn’t have a caps-locks key, so actually I can’t even try that…
I’ve never actually had to setup a Japanese IME on Windows, is there a default one from Microsoft or do you have to install a third party tool?
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I installed a new one from Google 日本語入力 – Google (where I also installed for Mac before).
Windows Japanese support already includes Japanese IME and I can’t find a way to hide that. I switch keyboard layout between two more languages, anyway, so I set the switch key to Ctrl + Alt + 1-4
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On mobile I make that katakana mistake a lot on the kitsun app because my phone always tries to capitalize the first letter.
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I personally set up my ime this way, because it’s just simpler to type katakana words on command.
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Mozc works that way for me. I think the way I have Google’s IME set up it converts capitals to katakana too, but I’m not sure something to check
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F7 is faster for converting specific words to katakana on the run. 
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Thanks. Setting up to use Shift makes inputting Katakana convenient. But, inputting ー＝・ still needs lifting away from Shift.
I can’t find settings to work with Cap Lock, however. Holding Shift only on a part of Romaji doesn’t convert, Nihonn = Ｎいほん. (WanaKana would turn to Hiragana.)
Haha, I’m a bit behind on my lessons huh 
I need to pick them back up soon. I had to stop taking on new ones because I’ve been unwell and anything new wasn’t sticking. So I’ve just been reviewing, and my existing kanji/vocab are leveling quite a bit lol
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i finally got through all my lessons! yeah, if i can’t do them all at once, for some reason i just can’t bring myself to do it. and i didn’t have time until now. but yay!!!
In particular, Shift and F7 appear to be pretty useful (because ー can be typed before F7). Shift for Katakana isn’t default, though.