In using the Wanikani website on a desktop, I noticed that the built in IME lists both the Romanji as well as having the hiragana.
On my iphone I avoid using romanji and use the hiragana IME so that I force my brain to remember hiragana. One downside is that I’ve made stupid errors when entering answers, but hey, it’s all part of the learning.
I find that instead of focusing on the hiragana and forcing my brain to remember, my eye goes to the Romanji right away when using the IME on this website. I think it’s a great IME and makes it easy to not have to worry about installing some native IME on my Mac.
Is there any way to turn off the Romanji on the website?
Even in Japan, most people use romaji entry when typing on computers in Japanese - though they’ll use the kana flick keyboard on the phone, since the keyboard is smaller. I’m not really sure it’s worth going so far as to use pure kana entry. If you really want to go that route, though, just install a separate IME and use that one rather than WaniKani’s (though in that instance you’ve gotta try to avoid looking at the kanji suggestions, because they’ll give the answers away).
Side note, there’s no N in romaji. In Japanese, it’s ローマ字 - you can think of it as “letters from Roma”.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and for the correction on Romaji!
I hear what you’re saying and that’s why for most of my time using Wankani it’s been on my iPhone or iPad where I do have the other IMEs. On a Macbook, the choices are bad. Either use a Romaji IME Or they have a Kana IME which looks like it maps to the keyboard. Unfortunately, using Kana on my laptop would either require I get stickers for my keyboard, a Japanese keyboard, or memorize the mapping, all of which don’t help.
Last night was my first time using Wanikani’s IME So it was a question that I thought the wider community could help me with.
So to the best of your knowledge then, you don’t know of a way to turn it off. It’s either use it or use a different method?
Well, that’s pretty much why they use Romaji entry in Japan too - the keyboards come with the kana labels on them, sure, buy why learn a second keyboard layout when the regular QWERTY one does the trick just as well? Sure, you need more keystrokes per kana, but muscle memory helps speed that up.
What I’m trying to get across is that there’s no reason to turn it off. Trying to come up with a different input method when the one WaniKani uses is the same as what 90% of Japanese people use already is not really a challenge you need to set for yourself.
(Well… mostly the same. WaniKani’s one does have one or two quirks. Though it’s possible they did away with those recently.)
If you know how to program you could probably come up with a simple userscript to allow kana-layout input in WK without too much work but as @Belthazar points out I personally really don’t think it’s worth it, and if you really want to use it then switching it at the OS level is probably simpler and will work everywhere outside of WK too.
I’m not lazy when it comes to learning different layouts, I type in dvorak for Latin, йцукен for Russian Cyrillic and I briefly considered learning to touchtype the Japanese JIS layout as well when I started studying Japanese but it’s pretty clear that there’s really no point in doing that unless you intend to type a lot of Japanese text really, really fast which is something I clearly won’t be able to do for a very long time, and not because of typing limitations.
Even among the Japanese as far as I know only professional typists who have to input a ton of Japanese on a daily basis bother learning it instead of just using a QWERTY IME (which they’ll need to know anyway any time they want to type something in Latin).
So I’m new to Wanikani and this community. I merely wanted to know if there’s a setting I’m missing to toggle it off. It seems based on your response and simias that there isn’t one.
We all have our reasons for wanting to do something. If it’s as simple as, “there’s no option in the Wanikani IME to turn off the Romaji” that’s cool. Armed with that information I’ll either use the website or go to my phone/iPad where there is an IME that isn’t Romaji.
I wasn’t asking which method is better or why people use certain IMEs. I only wanted to know if it is possible to turn it off easily.
You can, mind, type with the kana chart function (push the button labelled ひ underneath the answer entry field), but since you’d need to type with the mouse (or a touch screen) and you can only do one kana at a time, I feel like it’d drive you nuts in short order. It’d drive me nuts, in any case.
