I can’t believe it was so simple. After my Japanese-model laptop malfunctoned and Sony refused to touch it in the States, I bought a US model, but I’ve been wanting to use an external J-keyboard with my E-laptop for a long time and even purchased 3 keyboards in Japan, but was always too busy to be persistent enough to figure out the settings. I previously read Cameron Baccario’s article, but still no success.

I was able to do almost everything I needed on my laptop’s E-keyboard, but some required extra keystrokes. The one function I never figured out really frustrated me. Specifically, with a Japanese keyboard, if you don’t know how to read a kanji, you can simply highlight the kanji and press henkan to see the reading (pronunciation)in hiragana. This saves a lot of time looking things up.

Using an external Japanese keyboard not only allows me to type faster (full-size keyboard, and easier to find keys without looking), but also gives me additional functionality (noted above) and reduces the number of keystrokes required in many situations, such as switching back and forth between romaji (for Japanese) and “direct Input” (for English), or when using TRADOS translation memory software. I also find I can do Google searches faster on my Japanese keyboard because I can type quotation marks with only my left hand without looking, while using my right hand to highlight text to cut&paste, whereas the English keyboard requires both hands or the right hand, which means taking my hand off the mouse and looking down to find the quotation mark key.

Anyway, thank you! Where do I send payment?