7/28/2023
So you know what really fucks with me? Fucking technology. I have been using the Japanese language pack on my PC for idk how many years now. It normally works perfectly. Simply press Alt+Shift and I'm typing in Japanese ナイス～ But then the other day my PC updated. I didn't think anything of it for a while because I don't use Japanese too often. Then I found myself unable to switch to Japanese when playing PSO2. That was pretty odd, so I started looking into what the problem could be. I tried the increasingly unreliable Google with very little success, even for the issue where I was getting errors trying to reinstall it and searched specifically for the error code.
Funny how useless error codes are when you can't really find out any info about the error code itself. Can't even be certain any of the results are even written by real people who know what they're talking about or just AI trying to answer a question scrapped from a forum. That's the internet we live in now. I found two threads on the topic, one was Microsoft's own help desk (from 2015) and the other was a post on Stack Overflow (from 2019).
I tried every solution I was presented with, both in the threads and in the various "how to fix various problems" sites that I'm not sure were even legit. The one suggestion I didn't try was suggested several places and that was to literally create a new user account, install the language pack there, and transfer your files to the new user before deleting your existing account. To which I said: FUCK THAT! There is no fucking reason that a problem that did not exist one day, but suddenly exists the next, should not be solvable without burning the house down and rebuilding. This isn't some ransomware shit. This is literally just a built-in feature of Windows 10 suddenly not working and it's been a problem since at least 2015, though the solutions don't all work the way they used to, partly because certain menus literally no longer exist on Windows 10. There are new ways you have to navigate the OS to get to what you're looking for, and some things just no longer exist.
So anyway, I did eventually figure out a way to fix it (sort of). If by some miracle someone running into this problem happens to somehow get past all the search engine junk out there and finds this little blog on this shitty, under-developed neocities page, here's what you can do:
To start with, the issue at hand involves the Japanese Language Pack in Windows 10. The language icon appears on the task bar (ENG/J/etc), but it won't let you switch to Japanese (for me, other languages worked fine). Sometimes it would let me switch to Japanese, but it wouldn't allow me to change from romaji to kana. Clicking the button with the A in it would sometimes open the menu to switch inputs, but it wouldn't ever actually change. Sometimes clicking the A button would instead just say "Microsoft IME is disabled." That's the big issue right there, and I can almost guarantee it's entirely an issue with Microsoft IME, though I don't know enough about it to say for certain.
So what you're going to need to do is navigate to Language Preferences. This can be done by left-clicking on the ENG (or other language) button on the task bar in the bottom right, or you can search for Language Settings in the start menu (Windows button). Just press the windows key or the interface button and start typing. If you're getting the error where it isn't letting you install the language pack, I'm not sure if this will be quite as helpful, but it's worth a try and even if you do get them installed correctly that doesn't mean that it will actually work and you might still need to do this as I did. Once you're in Language Preferences, scroll down to your installed languages (add Japanese if you haven't already) and click on Japanese, then click on "Options." Next, at the bottom of that screen under "Keyboards," click on Microsoft IME, then Options. Go to "General" at the top, and then scroll to the bottom under "Compatibility." Click "Use previous version of Microsoft IME." Now, like I said, this only sort of fixes it. For me, I still have difficulty getting it to correctly switch to Japanese in the UI, but all of the keyboard shortcuts work perfectly.
Keyboard Shortcuts for Japanese Language Pack:
- Alt+Shift = Change Languages
- This cycles through all installed languages, if you have more than two, you'll need to get used to the order
- Shift+Caps = Switch input method between hiragana and romaji
- Ctrl+Caps = Switch specifically to Hiragana
- F7 = Convert hiragana to katakana after typing out text
- Use this while the prediction window is still up
Normally you should be able to switch to Katakana directly and I believe the Ctrl+Caps is supposed to switch between both systems, but this solution is imperfect and will only put you in Hiragana mode. Fortunately, like I said, F7 will convert hiragana to katakana.
So I want to address the reason that I'm going through all this trouble to put this answer up on the web, as shitty and imperfect as it is. As soon as I figured that out, after the existing solutions didn't work at all for me, I thought I would pop into those threads and offer an imperfect 2023 solution to people who, like myself, have no interest in burning their user account to the ground over a fucking language pack that worked fine the day before. This turned out to be impossible, however. Stack Overflow requires its own version of reddit karma before you can post in such an "active thread" as a 2 post thread from 2019, and the windows help desk thread was locked as though a solution from 2015 is going to be useful forever. Sure, new theads can be created, but those will run into the exact same problem as I'm running into here. No one will ever see them.
The reason I was able to find posts from 2015 and 2019 at all was because those were popular search results in the past, before AI-generated "help" pages and SEO clickfarms took over google's search results. I wanted to add a modern solution to these old posts because THOSE are the posts people are going to see. If those get updated with new solutions, people searching for answers will be able to find them, but that's not possible (unless I want to go farm discount karma on Stack Overflow which I don't want to do just for a single post). There's also the likely possiblity of people getting shitty about necro'ing an old post, without even considering the reason why an old post might need to be brought back from the dead. Anyway, the point is that the internet sucks these days, but at least I can make my own shitty little post on my own shitty little website that no one will ever read.
Aside from that, I think I'm going to start managing this page as basically a little "blog" of sorts. Gonna update it from time to time with new stuff that's going on with me and I'll eventually make it look like something more than shitty text on a white background, but I've gotta learn HTML again for that.