Hello! I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I saw that the yaoi/shounen-ai (?) anime airing this summer has the title written in katakana, which I tried to to read only to notice this new character~ 「ウ"」! Curious if anyone knows the exact pronunciation and just how recently this was added to the katakana library, because I have not encountered this in any resources I’ve studied from.
Please and thank you~!
P.S. Out of curiosity, but is there a katakana keyboard on iOS? By typing this thread, I’ve realized there is none and I’m not sure if it doesn’t exist or I’m just lost navigating this thing… please and thank you.
It’s supposed to represent the “V” sound but most of the Japanese people will pronounce it “B” because they can’t pronounce “V”. Like how they pronounce “L” as “R”…kind of.
Looks like you can enter ヴ normally, but it’s also possible to combine a unicode character that just shows the dakuten (U+3099 COMBINING KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK) with anything you like.
(I hope this shows, at least I can see it )
For example も with dakuten: も゙
Kanji 二 with dakuten: 二゙
The dakuten is in the middle because it is nonsense and the system doesn’t know where to put it, but it may be useful for future “inventions”.
I don’t know about iOS but whatever you’re using to type Japanese should let you input katakana only. Maybe it’s a autocorrect suggestion like I have on my SwiftKey keyboard, maybe you can press a button to convert what you just input into katakana, but if you have a Japanese input method, you should have this feature.
I’m using the standard Japanese keyboard, and it only shows hiragana.
To get the ヴ katakana, you can either hold ゔ and swipe left, or choose う and then the ﾞ小 ﾟ key at the bottom left. Then, choose ゔ from the suggestions.
How do they occupy the same space like that? When I try typing it, I can only get the dakuten to appear as its own character. Like, も゛. Which makes a rather unsightly empty space.
How do you type it? I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but the input system has to fuse them together. On OSX I first input the も, then Ctrl-Cmd-Space, enter U+3099 in the window and click on ゛. After a bit of thinking it puts the combined character.
On Windows its supposed to work with the Character Map (charmap) . 車̈車̃
However, my input window for the forum starts acting funky now, maybe it’s not a too good idea
I have to switch to the kana input keyboard - romaji input doesn’t seem to let me do it at all. With kana input, for example P + [ = ぜ, but M + [ = も゛.
Most of the time, kana input keyboards don’t use the unicode combining dakuten, because し and じ, for example, are both single unicode characters. When you try placing a dakuten, it checks the previous kana - if it can take a dakuten, it will add one. If it can’t, it’ll just put down that lone ゛ - which is not combining
(Katakana-Hiragana Voiced Sound Mark U+309B vs Combining Katakana-Hiragana Voiced Sound Mark U+3099 - ゛ vs ゙ - and let it be known that I had to use the javascript console to copy that)
TL;DR you can’t do it because you’re not typing the same character
d゙a゙k゙u゙t゙e゙n゙s
Which doesn’t work in the preview but does in the editor. Let’s see!
Ok it didn’t
To do katakana you just start typing the word in and the autocomplete suggestions will give you katakana that you can select. Here’s an example when typing テレビ:
Thank you to everyone for responding! It was a lot of help and very interesting to see the different ways to use, especially as I have yet to implement a Japanese keyboard (other than on my phone). Please have a good day~!
I sure do wish those mobile IMEs had a dedicated key for entering katakana, though. Relying on autocomplete works okay for common words like テレビ, but when I start entering weird video game names that aren’t common katakana terms, I sometimes have to scroll quite a bit in the autocomplete window before I find a straight katakana conversion of the entered text.
Don’t disagree. It would be nice if the flick keyboard could be put into katakana mode and just go from there. Though I will say, even with rather obscure words the autocomplete has been pretty smart in realizing I probably wanted katakana not hiragana.
)
