Small characters

So I’ve run into this problem the moment I got past the first set of diacriticals and started to learn kanji. The first batch I got included 上 and 入, but the quiz would not accept the writing. It took me a moment to realize it wanted me to use small character for ゆ and よ, so here’s my question.

How to you type small characters? I know it can be done, I did so by chance while spamming my keyboard, but wasn’t able to replicate it.

It would also be nice if the lesson explained it’s supposed to be a small character. Had I not have enough prior knowledge about Japanese spelling before, it would be a literal dead end.

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If you type the letters running into each other, it will automatically make them small.

So typing nyuu will give you にゅう, where typing niyuu will give you にゆう.

If you need to make a small character without relying on typing others, you can type an x first. So typing xyu will give you ゅ where typing just yu will give you ゆ.

If you’d like to know more about typing in Japanese there are a few useful pages you can look at in the FAQ:

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Hello hello, welcome!

The FAQ does state that kana is a prerequisite knowledge beyond the first batch of radicals. :slight_smile:

And during evey time you’re required to input kana, you have the tools on-screen to check spelling:

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Still, it’s a pretty easy thing to miss as they don’t differ much in size, especially for people who just started learning, I did miss it at first. For example I knew about little つ, but didn’t notice that や, ゆ and よ also become smaller when you use it that way. A tooltip or something would be nice if you write it with normal characters, similar to how it accepts slightly misspelled explanations in English. Right now it’s just “wrong” with no explanation.

Yeah, many fonts which are commonly used in manga have almost no noticeable difference between つ and っ, which is sometimes an exercise in frustration…

But aye, the small や-line characters trip up so many new people that (at least for the first level or two) typing the wrong one should warrant a shake and an error message rather than just outright being marked wrong.

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And it’s actually pretty standard to have all furigana (particularly vertical furigana) be the same size. So the same thing can happen in novels as well.

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It does and I’m getting better at knowing which is which, but it still trips me up :sob:

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