A Nihongo Note

I just finished taking my Japanese final for Beginning 2 and thought I’d post a little tidbit. Earlier today I managed to spend about 30 minutes figuring out how to input the interpunct character that is used to separate transcribed foreign words written in Katakana like オペレーティング・システム (operating system). In unicode this ・little guy・ is called the ‘katakana middle dot’ or in Japanese, nakaguro. How to input this character in OSX seems to be completely undocumented. In hopes of saving someone this precious time, the kotoeri key combination to use, in kana mode, is ⌥+/ (option/alt + forward slash). You can also enter なかぐろ+[space]