Lately I’ve been doing Genki I and I’ve noticed that there are a lot of words like コーヒー that have these: ー
What is it and how can I write it with my keyboard? I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.
Thanks.
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It’s typed with the hyphen key.
As for what is it, it indicates a vowel being lengthened. Whatever vowel came first gets lengthened for an extra mora.
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And it has a name:
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Alright I got it, took a while though since I have a spanish keyboard 
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Just out of curiosity, what have been doing for answers up until now? ビー玉 is in level 3. ハート形 is in level 9, etc.
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I typed the minus sign instead and it seemed to work so I thought thats the way it had to be written until I started Genki and noticed that its actually shorter.
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Isn’t that the same key as a hyphen?
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I think they are but when I type them in google translator it looks like it treats them as different characters and therefore doesnt translate correctly, here on WK they look exactly the same.
But either way, what you were typing up until now was working, right?
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Yeah I was just wondering if I was doing anything wrong all this time thanks!
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They are different characters but the plugin WK uses to transcode romaji also changes out the hyphen for the longer Japanese character. By the way, if you are using an IME, it will be using English keyboard layout, so the position of the hyphen may be different.
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