掲示板 Forums - Typing kana for Osaka returns wrong kanji

Try this: Type おおさかけん Hit Spacebar once Hit the right arrow key once. 「けん」 should be highlighted Hit Spacebar to bring up the dropdown list Use the up and down arrow keys to select 県, then press Enter IME will remember your choice from now on, so you now should be able to just type おおさかけん and hit Spacebar once to display the correct kanji.

Other words are irrelevant, because each combination of kanji is considered unique under IME. I don't know why おおさかけん defaults to 大阪圏 when the others don't, but it does it on my system too, so I assume it's just saved that way as default. When you type おおさかけん, you hit Spacebar to turn it into kanji, right? It should look like this: [IMG]http://i45.tinypic.com/suubdy.jpg[/IMG] Then: [IMG]http://i50.tinypic.com/23wtgnl.png[/IMG] Notice that the first two kanji are highlighted. However, you want to change the third kanji. To do this, you need to select it using the right-arrow key on your keyboard. Here is an example of the right-arrow key (note that its location and appearance will depend on your particular model of keyboard): [IMG]http://i45.tinypic.com/2wrnk84.png[/IMG] Once you have the third kanji selected, it will look like this: [IMG]http://i46.tinypic.com/ayvic7.png[/IMG] Pressing Spacebar here will allow you to choose 県 (or whatever you want) from the pulldown menu, like so: [IMG]http://i50.tinypic.com/2ez7bbs.png[/IMG] Once you perform these steps successfully, IME will remember your choice, so next time it will turn おおさかけん immediately into 大阪県.

Glad you got it fixed! As you figured out, IME is pretty smart. Not only can it remember your last-selected reading for a particular kanji, it can actually adjust what it considers a "single unit," i.e. how many kanji it should actually count as a single word when it tries to parse the かな. In this case, you forced it to see おおさかけん as a single unit, therefore it knows to use 県, rather than 圏. If you have ever hit Spacebar and seen the choice "0 - Alternate candidate for phrase boundary," you have seen another way in which you can let IME know what exactly it should consider as a single unit. In Windows 7, you can also add words manually through the language bar (you might have to undock it from the taskbar to see the menu). From the bar, choose Tools ---> Dictionary Tool. Under the "Add Word" tab, enter the かな for the word into the "Reading" field, and the desired kanji to parse to in the "Display" field, like this: [IMG]http://i49.tinypic.com/30axbpz.png[/IMG] You can check the "Register and Send" box if you want to let Microsoft know about your suggestion, or you can simply click the Add button to save the word into your computer's Japanese IME dictionary.

I think mysticfive's probably right about why it wasn't working for you, but for reference, if you find that the IME has grouped too much in one word boundary, you can deselect following kana in the same way with the left arrow key.

Yeah, Osaka's a "fu", not a ken, like Kyoto. Just like Tokyo is "to" and Hokkai "do". You should notice the same thing if you try ken with any of those. Of course, Hokkaido's a little easier to remember, it being part of the name and all.