By the way, and on the subject of typing faster, does anyone here know anything about using a Dvorak keyboard layout to enter Japanese in Windows? (XP, which is what is used here in school) If I try to use something other than a Japanese keyboard layout, the whole conversion process goes away.

At home it is not a problem, since keyboard layout, romaji/kana conversion and kana/kanji conversion are all independent of each other when you are using a Unix-like system. It seems that OS X can easily do this as well, but for Windows it seems very tricky, and apparently involves registry hacking and knowing details about what obscurely named files contain the right keymap...

(Why Dvorak? Well, it is supposedly faster and better in all sorts of ways than the standard QWERTY layout. An interesting point for people wanting to type Japanese is that the vowels A O E U are right under the left hand, at the "asdf" positions, and 'I' is just one step to the right. This should make it very well suited for romaji-to-kana text input, since you naturally alternate between left and right hands when touch typing and move your hands around very little.

For me personally, I was fed up with the horrible Swedish keyboard layout and wanted to have something better, so Dvorak seemed like a good starting point.)

There might be something in the Japanese Wikipedia article, so I'll try to work my way though that when I get home.