How to unlock your phone's secret Japanese emoji keyboard (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

We're over emoji, guys.

Laughing face with tears of joy is in the dictionary.

Even your grandparents use emoji in their text messages now.

Like all good fads, though, old-school Japanese 'kaomoji' - created by using existing punctuation and extra-textual characters - are coming back into fashion.

You've probably seen this one before:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And this one.

¯\(ツ)/¯

But they're pretty good for conveying a lot of things, like excitement:

o(≧∇≦o)

Confusion.

ヾ(｡ꏿ﹏ꏿ)ﾉﾞ

Fighting talk.

(ง ͡ʘ ͜ʖ ͡ʘ)ง

Do you like bears? There are loads of bears.

It turns out that your iPhone actually comes with a kaomoji starter kit of more than 100 emoticons.

To unlock it, all you need to do is go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Add New Keyboard > Japanese > Kana.

When you're writing your next message, tap the globe icon in the bottom left hand corner to switch keyboards to Kana, and look for the emoticon face ^_^:

Et voila! There are your ready-to-use kaomoji.

Those nice people over at Mashable have even made a how-to video in case that wasn't clear:

Now, go forth and explore a whole new world of visual communication! (∩˃o˂∩)♡

More: Here's how to make it even harder for governments to hack your mobile phone

More: Skier Nicolas Vuignier swings iPhone around his head, creates absolutely breathtaking video