People describe emoticons with many different adages. A picture is worth a thousand words. Hieroglyphics for the modern age. In short, they are pictures or icons used to convey emotion or messages without words.
There is of course, the built-in emoji keyboard from EmojiWorks keyboard available on all Macs and iOS devices. But sometimes, the built-in keyboard just doesn’t have the picture you need, or it’s not cute enough, or something. But the Japanese have gotten artistic about their emoticons, and now you too can activate this hidden emoji keyboard, with over one hundred emoticons.
The keyboard can be located in these 10 steps:
1. Launch the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. (The grey/silver one with the gear icon.)
2. Tap on General settings. (The icon looks like the settings icon)
3.Scroll down to select Keyboard, it’s about 2 thirds down the list, just past the bottom of the screen.
4. Select the “Keyboards” option at the top of the keyboards section. (Is that starting to not look like English to anyone else?)
5. At the bottom of the list, select “Add new Keyboard…”
6. Choose Japanese from the list of available iPhone keyboards. It will be located on the second list, beneath “Third-Party Keyboards” which you may have installed from other apps such as Bitmoji.
7. Japanese is available in two dialects, Kana and Romaji. Select “Kana” from the list and click done in the upper right corner.
8. Now comes the time to test it. Open up messages.
9. Tap on the globe icon. This option took me to my emoji keyboard. In the lower corner were Japanese symbols, which took me to the Japanese keyboard. If you long-press on the globe symbol you can select Japanese from the list directly.
10. Select the ^-^ face on the lower left of the Japanese keyboard. Different emoticons will appear above the keyboard.
11. Select the up arrow to the right of that bar, and it will show you a large gallery of Japanese style emoticons to use for whatever you need.
Selecting the globe again will take you back to the English keyboard.
To remove the keyboard, follow the same procedure into the Keyboards list, select edit in the upper right corner and press the minus button, and then select delete besides “Japanese.” This removes the keyboard from your list of installed keyboards, but you can always reinstall it if you feel the need.
