A Nihongo Note

December 11, 2007 in Japanese by screen | 3 comments

Katakana Middle Dot (Interpunct)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] ;)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

  1. curious’s avatar

    curious on June 30, 2008 at 7:30 am

    I forget how to do this every few months - thank you, you saved me a significant amount of time!

  2. Leif’s avatar

    Leif on July 9, 2008 at 12:06 pm

    Thanks, this was really helpful.

    I was thinking of taking classes at Soko Gakuen or The Japan Society of Northern California. It’s really cool that SF has so many classes for Japanese.

  3. Lauri’s avatar

    Lauri on November 1, 2008 at 8:58 am

    ども！ども！ I was going crazy trying to find out how to do that on OSX! I resorted to drawing in the interpunct after I printed out my essay!

    ローリー