Yes, there’s a secret Japanese emoticon keyboard hidden in your iPhone! If you’ve grown tired of the usual emoji-filled conversations (We wouldn’t blame you), you can use this instead to breathe a touch of creativity into your texts and tweets.
Don’t get us wrong; those good ol’ emojis get the job done. But sometimes we want something a little different… a little more expressive. Something like this: @(・●・)@ or ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ. If you agree, then read on.
How to Unlock the Kaomoji Keyboard
Now, how do we actually type those characters in? Easy-peasy. You just need to make a few taps into your settings, and you’ll be typing away with dozens of these cute kaomojis before you know it. Yep, that’s what these are called—kaomojis. It literally means ‘face mark’.
These cute Japanese emojis are made the same way we used to make emoticons back in the days before the Unicode Consortium blessed us with the emoji keyboard. We type in letters, numbers, and symbols. The only difference is that Japanese keyboards have a lot of characters that Western ones don’t, so they can make more pictograms than the boring old QWERTY keyboard.
But I digress… Here’s how you actually install the kaomoji keyboard on your iPhone:
Go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Japanese → Kana. It’s as easy as that! To use the emojis, tap (or long-press, if you have multiple keyboards) the globe icon on your existing keyboard and select the Japanese letters in the menu pops up. Then, tap on the small emoticon face on the lower left part of your keyboard. The emojis will show up above the letters, which you can maximise by clicking on the arrow-down button on the right of that panel.
And there you have it: the Kana/kaomoji keyboard is all yours to play around with! Super easy, right? I love how technology can be so friendly sometimes! Let us know what you think about your kaomoji keyboard in the comments below.