So, I turned on Japanese on my Mac. I also turned on “let individual applcations have separate input methods” because I often talk to A in English and B in Japanese and C in Swedish simultaneously on Adium, and it keeps track of which is which when I tab between them, which is standard behavior. No claps, sorry.
But… when I try to change it so that Swedish is the default input methods …. I can’t. Uh. Right.
… huh? Why can’t I drag and arrange my input methods in order of preference?
The deal is, whenever I open a new … window. Or tab, in Safari… I get it in Japanese.
Imagine this scenario: I open up a new tab in my browser! I decide to boldly go where none other has boldly gone before, and I type in “www.google.com” BUT!
BUT!!!! I do not GET “www.google.com” in the browser.
No sir. I don’t. I get “っっw。ごおgぇ。cおm”
in the browser.
And this is not what I wanted! Nope. No sir. Not anywhere or any way.
Can you feel my frustration shining? For now, I’ve turned Japanese off, so any time I talk to my girlfriend or whoever I will do so in “Konnichiwa watashi no chinchin wo sutte kudasai” romaji. Anyone got any nice clues on this one? It’s completely unbelievable that they’d not realize that people, sometimes, would prefer not to have their languages thrown at them in alphabetic order. (Yes, “Japanese” comes before “Swedish”.) Or is it that every tester was an American, thus “English” comes before “Japanese” and it’s not a “problem”?
EDIT: I finally figured this out. The reason it was acting up was because of 3 separate factors which, combined, do not work:
1. Japanese input.
2. Swedish as alternative input
3. English as operating system language.
The fix is to change the OS language to Swedish. I personally hate having the OS in Swedish, but I’m apparently given no choice. Better that than no Japanese though, I suppose.
Heh! I’m not actually sure how you change the default for an individual application. I’d have thought it would remember the last language you’d used for that specific application, and use that.
I don’t use that ‘individual applications’ option – in fact I can’t find it in my preferences (I’m on 10.5). Here’s the way I have it set up:
- English off (yes, off)
- Romaji on
- Hiragana on (hold shift when typing to get katakana)
- Russian (Phonetic) on
It then defaults to ‘romaji’ by default, and I can type English.
Something else you may not be aware of. If you have the ‘show input menu in menu bar’ on, and from said menu bar item, select the ‘kotoeri preferences. As I don’t ordinarily use the CAPS LOCK key, I use the second ‘caps lock key’ drop-down option set to ‘when down input “Hiragana”‘.
This then means – if I have CAPS LOCK off (the default of course) I’m typing in romaji i.e. English. If I turn CAPS LOCK on, so the green light is lit, I can type Japanese. It works brilliantly for me, and means I can switch between the two languages instantly. (To use Russian – which I do rarely – I choose it manually from the menu dropdown.)
Not sure if that helps you with your situation at all though. Drop me an email if you want.
I finally figured this out. The reason it was acting up was because of 3 separate factors which, combined, do not work:
1. Japanese input.
2. Swedish as alternative input
3. English as operating system language.
The fix is to change the OS language to Swedish. I personally hate having the OS in Swedish, but I’m apparently given no choice. Better that than no Japanese though, I suppose.
Well I think we can probably say that you’re an edge case; there probably aren’t too many people that want the OS in English, but to use Swedish as the primary language. I mean, it’s not so logical when you think about it. It would be like me wanting to use the OS in Italian, but to type most of my language in English – why would I do that?
Glad to hear you’ve found a workaround though, or at least have identified the reason it’s happening. Have you submitted feedback to Apple (apple.com/feedback) about it?
Actually it’s very logical! The operating system is developed and documented in English by English speaking people and is then translated to all other languages which results in really stupid results a lot of the time. The translated version of something is more or less always worse than the original.
Think of it like this: would you rather read a book in its original language, if you were able to? Of course you would. Now imagine that instead of a book, it’s an error message or something similarly critical. Getting an invalid translation for an error is in fact more common than anything else because you only see those in rare cases. Also since the native English population is far higher than the Swedish one, chances that you’ll find someone else with the same error e.g. on Google are much higher.
Bah, sorry about that. I didn’t realize it was a copy-paste of your post — it looked legit, obviously. :/ Spammers are getting crafty.