Courty

I have recently joined a website(lang-8) basically helps you with your language skills. But i always end up putting the romaji in a translator to turn it to kanji, and its getting irritating. I would like to just have the option to type in japanese- but im not really all that sure how. I have your run of the mill windows vista and im not so sure my parents would be willing to buy me extra language software. I've skimmed over LIP and MUI's for vista but i don't really get the paragraphs i've found are trying to tell me o.0 (maybe its just because im really tired...?but still>.<) so is there a free option if theres an option at all?