vhiec wrote: right i forgot they added that. is it commonly used? or do most people still change it to b? it's what my Japanese teacher in college taught us but maybe she was trying to keep things simplified.
the language whatchamacallit for windows does let me cycle through characters if there's more than one way to write something, so once i get more familiar with katakana i can make use of that. i do use it for hiragana sometimes. though i find it frustrating that it defaults ん as "n" and i have to cycle down to the ん character every time. i don't understand why it'd do that.
From what I understand "b" is kinda old school, but it's still ok. These katakana are really popular if you read blogs and tweets in japanese. I think it started out as a trend that is gaining more and more acceptance. Some examples of the kana can be found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.coscom.co.jp/learnjapanese801/kanatable.html. It's not wrong or right but a generational thing.
My best advice is to ask a native japanese speaker who is around your age. Sometimes you'll find out that your name is already kinda popular and there's a set way to spell your name already. My name has one :)
about ん: in order to get it to type ん, you may need to type in "nn" or continue on to the next syllable. For example, you would type ばんご as ba-n-go and the "n" will automatically correct itself. If you are using ん at the end of a sentence or something, like みかん, then you may want to use "nn" (mi-ka-nn).
