KAO means face, and MOJI means character, so literally "face character."

I love Japanese emoticons because they're so cute and

they're so varied from what we can make with our keyboards.

Like you can make a little emoticon man who's writing a note.

I don't know where I would ever use that but it's adorable!

But the issue for me is that it's really difficult to make Japanese emoticons

on our keyboards because we don't have a lot of those special characters.

We either have to find it somewhere on the internet

and copy it or you have to know the alt code.

If you don't know what an alt code is, that's

where if you hold down the alt key on your computer and then you type in a series of

numbers on your numpad then like special characters will like pop up.

So like fun fact! If you hold the alt key and you press the number 3 you get a heart! ♥

So to be able to type those special characters you literally

have to memorize a series of numbers, which is too complicated!

So today I'm going to give you lots of tips and tricks on using a Japanese keyboard so

you can make emoticons more easily and use them on my videos more often!!

Because I want to see them more often because they're so cute!

So let's get to it!

So the first thing you have to do if you haven't already done it is enable the Japanese keyboard

on your computer.

And to do that for Windows you go to control panel, and depending on

your version of Windows you'll have to find where it says "Language and Region" and then

get to "Change keyboards."

Click on that, click "change keyboards," click add, and then you search down for Japanese.

And then when you add Japanese the keyboard you want is "Micrsoft IME."

And then you click okay, okay, and then it'll show up down here.

And down here's where you can switch between using Japanese and English.

And we're going to be using Japanese.

If you have a Mac I'm sorry, you'll have to Google how to do that on your computer.

And for like my 20 non-Japanese Linux users, you

guys are smart enough to figure it out yourself.

Okay, now tip 1!

If you have a Japanese computer there will be a button up here that will let you

switch between English and Japanese characters, but for us, we don't have that.

So, you don't want to have to constantly go down here to

click and switch back and forth between the two, so there's an option that will let you

set some keys so you can change it on your keyboard.

And on mine the way it came was I just hold the shift button and

then press caps lock, and as you can see it switches back and forth.

So, that's a really quick way to do it so you don't have to

be constantly moving your mouse around and clicking places.

So how you actually type Japanese characters

is you literally just type it out in romaji.

So, "u-r-e-s-h-i-i-" and you click the space bar to lock it that word in.

And then if you click the space bar again a menu will show up and it will let you

select which kanji you want to use, or at the bottom it usually has katakana.

So you can scroll back and forth between them.

And that's how Japanese people type kanji.

And some kanji have a lot of different options, so for example, KATA.

You have 12 different options that you can choose from here.

And it also works for special characters--not just kanji.

So for example, in English, for quotation marks all

we have are these (unless you change your font).

But, in Japanese if you do quotation marks, you have 8

different quotation marks that you can choose from.

AND it also works if you type out the name of a special character!

So for example, triangle is SANKAKU.

And as you can see, a triangle comes up first because that's what I use the most.

As you can see, just by typing SANKAKU I have 6 different special characters to choose

from other than just the kanji.

Another example is like the degree symbol.

In Japanese that's DO. So I type in DO, and I have a little eye!

BUT it also works with letters from other languages!

So for example, in Cyrillic you can type out the letter д

in Japanese like this, and you can get this little mouth!

Whoops!

DO. And it also works for Greek, so like SHIGUMA.

And now you have a little surprised person!

So you just have to play around with the different character options they have on their

keyboard or figure out the names of different characters and you'll be able to type them.

Ohmygash why can't I spell SANKAKU?!

And it's a little man taking a bath! He's so cute!

And you can look up the names of different kanji and see if any of them work for you in faces.

So you really just have to play around.

Like SARA, that means plate.

And it makes kind of a scary little mouth. SANKAKU~

I'm sorry.

But Rachel, I don't know the names of these characters in Japanese! What do I do?!

Well, that is where Wikipedia comes into play.

You can always just Google it and try to figure out the name, OR you can

go to Wikipedia and then for example like look up the Greek alphabet.

And translation tip!

A pretty good way to translate things is using the Wikipedia

page and then just switching the language over to Japanese.

It doesn't always work. I have seen some pages that did not translate well into Japanese.

But for this one it does work, so for the Greek alphabet.

So here you can see the little characters and you see the name of them in Japanese.

So this is all you have to type.

So for like epsilon--IPUSHIRON.

And you get a little poochy face! Poochy face man~

And he's happy. Aww look how happy he is. Poochy face~

So now that you've learned some useful tips and you have my little bank of characters

down in the description that you can use, I want to see the BEST kao moji that you can

come up with!

And to my Japanese viewers since you guys should be veterans I expect to see

EXTRA special kao moji from you!

So I'm really excited to see what you guys can come up with! So see you next time!