It seems that Marimokkori's Let's Learn! Japanese blog series died off, but I noticed that quite a few people have started learning the language. Since I'm currently learning Japanese as well, I thought I could share the resources I find useful:
Japanese IME Short for Input Method. This is how you write Japanese characters on a computer. You should be able to install this directly from your operating system. You type romaji, hit space and get a list of matching Japanese expressions. A tip: don't write "tsu" for つ, just "tu" is enough. You can switch between various modes of Japanese input, especially hiragana and katakana. For details see your IME's documentation.
WWWJDIC A very detailed online dictionary. It's the main dictionary I use, especially because it has voice samples by native speakers for most of the words I tried so far (some audio files are missing though). It took me a long time to actually find the voice samples because they were blocked by NoScript. There also are stroke order diagrams for many common kanji:
Denshi Jisho The name says it all: It's another online dictionary. Also very good, but lacks voice samples as far as I can tell.
Rikaichan is a popup Japanese-to-English/German/French/Russian dictionary add-on for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.
With Rikaichan, you can hover over Japanese text in your browser and it will display a list of matching translations for words or short expressions. It is not a replacement for actually learning the language, but useful to fill in blanks in your vocabulary on the spot.
Handwritten Kanji Search Draw a kanji and select the kanji you meant from the best matches to your drawing. Especially nice if you have a graphics tablet or similar inut devices, but a mouse does the job as well. Be sure to read the stroke order and direction guidelines linked there. There are exceptions, but for the majority of kanji, stroke order and direction actually is easy once you are used to writing kanji. This site links each kanji suggestion to the respective entry in one of several online dictionaries (customizable).
JLPT Resources The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a globally standardized test. It goes from level 5 (easy) to level 1 (hard). On this page you can get an overview over the things that belong to each level. I mention it specifically because the vocabulary lists on this site are useful for the next element on my list.
Anki Flashcards for remembering just about anything. It runs on a large variety of platforms. You can create your own flashcards or import ones you find on the internet. I personally got mine from the page mentioned above and then modified and verified the cards as I learnt them. Anki increases the intervals between two showings of the same card as you get better at memorizing it. It is a very efficient method of learning and I find it very easy to keep my learning discipline up with Anki.
I think these are all the tools I regularly use. Feel free to post additional ones!
Did you just read my mind? I was looking for a thread like this literally 10 seconds ago. This should be in the general forum like the learn korean thread. Now all we need is actual content to learn the language to put in the thread along with the tools.
you can search by all kind of things, you can draw if you click the little button right next to "search:" (bottom right, above meaning). you can type in whatever you want if you're not comfortable with grammar yet and it'll tell you what kind of word it is + it's tense.
Edit: Oh obviously it does have all kinds of useful information on kanji as well, animated stroke order and all that stuff. Redid the screeny to show at least what I mentioned above
It's not an online application though, but it's free.
Edit2: Just remembered we had this language exchange thread on TL a while back and the OP was awesome. The OP had a bunch of learning resources in there. I'd definitely check it out if you haven't seen it yet: click me! Just scroll down and look for the spoiler that says "Japanese" or the one that's labeled "general use"
I had 6GB worth of learning material that went on a hard drive that was dropped and broken. So sad I didn't have it duplicated anywhere. Had e-books, videos, workbooks, etc... Lots of good stuff.
If you already speak korean, this is going to make things much faster for you: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar I'm not sure I'd recommend it otherwise. There's also a facebook group for this site, a very active and helpful community.
What a great resource thread! I'm in my 2nd semester learning Japanese and have personally found all the websites OP listed to be super beneficial. Considering flash cards are your best friend while learning Japanese (really any language) definitely check out Anki for anyone wanting to learn a language. ありがとございます！
I have been thinking about continuing a Let's Learn series from about where Marimokkori stopped / began hiatus, but to be honest I'm not anywhere near as qualified as some of the people that I know are around on TL.
I'd recommend the Japanese Headstart course. Intended to train U.S. Government personnel assigned to overseas posts, it can be a useful beginner's tool to go from beginner to intermediate and provides decent knowledge of conversational Japanese.
If you have a tablet and are comfortable using a Nintendo DS Emulator (better yet, if you have a NDS...) I'd also recommend grabbing the game Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. It's a portable writing dictionary with full lookup features. It's fantastic for Kanji lookup because if you come across a Kanji you don't know how to pronounce, simply write it into the DS / tablet and it will attempt to find the same Kanji and look up the word in whatever dictionary is currently active. It was made for JP-EN-JP so it's really an invaluable tool. Here's a video that convinced me.
On September 13 2013 12:53 hp.Shell wrote: I have been thinking about continuing a Let's Learn series from about where Marimokkori stopped / began hiatus, but to be honest I'm not anywhere near as qualified as some of the people that I know are around on TL.
I'd recommend the Japanese Headstart course. Intended to train U.S. Government personnel assigned to overseas posts, it can be a useful beginner's tool to go from beginner to intermediate and provides decent knowledge of conversational Japanese.
If you have a tablet and are comfortable using a Nintendo DS Emulator (better yet, if you have a NDS...) I'd also recommend grabbing the game Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. It's a portable writing dictionary with full lookup features. It's fantastic for Kanji lookup because if you come across a Kanji you don't know how to pronounce, simply write it into the DS / tablet and it will attempt to find the same Kanji and look up the word in whatever dictionary is currently active. It was made for JP-EN-JP so it's really an invaluable tool. Here's a video that convinced me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWISyoFF9to
There's actually a way to do that on the iPhone as well. Just install the simplified Chinese keyboard and there'll be an option that lets you write the kanji. Download whatever random Japanese dictionary and voila. It's all free to boot. Might be possible on Android too but I have no idea.
Though, if I remember correctly, it takes into consideration stroke order, so if you don't know how stroke orders work it'll be difficult to use.
I greatly prefer Google's IME over the one that comes with Windows because it'll give you real-time guesses for what you're trying to type.
Also, my favorite dictionary is http://ejje.weblio.jp/ because their sample sentence bank is enormous. They've got translated sentences from a wide variety of sources including wikipedia, technical documentation, classic literature, etc. Yahoo's dictionary can be nice too.
I'm kinda interested in that, so I followed the link... but I get a lot of rubbish text. Normally I have no issues displaying Japanese text, so I'm not quite sure what the reason could be. A couple of chapters seems to display fine, but others are just random meaningless signs. Do I need a specific font?
As you get better at Japanese, I recommend dic.yahoo.jp. Their 国語辞書 is extremely valuable when you're at the point where a simple 1-1 translation between japanese and english just doesn't cut it. You obviously need to be good enough at japanese to understand the definitions to use it though.
If you're into taking the JLPT, the kanzen master books are worth buying, they list exactly everything you need to know so technically you can just memorize them and your chances at succeeding are greatly increased.
i have just finished memorising hiragana+katakana and now have to move onto the next step
what process did you take in your early days of learning?
im thinking the next thing i should do is
a) learn the meanings of some hiragana words (this will help me practice reading/writing hiragana faster)
b) start memorising kanji according to a wordlist
c) start to understand sentence structure (grammar)
i have the google ide (i can press alt-shift to switch to ez hiragana input , after setting my keyboard back to default english)
いいです
i was using memrise at the very start but think its better for me to just write out 5 things to learn (on paper) and add to my paper list. actually i use a £1 white-board (with dry eraser pen) instead of paper.
i recommend learning japanese to anyone who would like to progressively improve at something instead of playing dota all day (lol)
On September 13 2013 16:45 FFGenerations wrote: i have just finished memorising hiragana+katakana and now have to move onto the next step
what process did you take in your early days of learning?
im thinking the next thing i should do is
a) learn the meanings of some hiragana words (this will help me practice reading/writing hiragana faster)
b) start memorising kanji according to a wordlist
c) start to understand sentence structure (grammar)
I would do something like this: 1. Learn basic grammar. I honestly don't know any good resource for this. Taekims guide to japanese (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar) is probably the best online resource I know, but there at least used to be some issues with it. Above all, I would recommend a proper textbook which introduces grammar in a logical fashion.
2. Learn words. Learn the words used in the examples when learning the grammar, and look up some wordlist for basic common words, the wordlist for JLPT5 is a great start. Use anki, memorize them. Using a paper and doing it manually is fine for short term, I usually did that before I entered words into Anki, but you need something for the long term, and Anki is perfect for it. Honestly, your vocabulary is going to be your main asset always, a language where you know a few thousand words will always be understandable regardless of your knowledge in the rest.
3. Learn the kanji for the words you're learning, but I highly recommend NOT just memorizing the kanji as part of the word. Look up the kanji separately, learn how it's written by hand, learn the parts of it, make a mnemonic of it. Study what kind of words it's used in. Don't worry about memorizing the pronounciations, but get comfortable with how the kanji is constructed. This knowledge is amazing to have when you're learning more words using the same kanji.
I listed it in terms of importance, but honestly, everything builds on everything else so you'd do well to try to make it all into one form of study. Learn a new grammatical construct, learn all the words used in the example sentences, and learn the kanji for those words.
I started on kanji very early in my Japanese learning (just after I finished hiragana and katakana), and I found that to be a good way. If you like anime or some other Japanese material, just remember words you hear often and also remember the kanji for it. Don't worry too much about all the readings of a kanji, you get those after remembering more words.
I've never been a fan of studying grammar rigorously, but these things vary from person to person. I just used the language enough to get a feeling of what is correct and not. Of course, this requires a basic understanding of sentence structure to start with.
Write kanji. A lot. And then some more. Make mnemonics or whatever (I never did, but many like this approach). When you have learned the simple kanji, you'll see that many other kanjis are just built out of these. You can often "guess" the pronunciation from other similar kanji.
I personally use the textbooks Genki 1 & 2. They are fine although I really don't have much to compare them to. They cover JLPT 5, 4 and I think at least the majority of JLPT 3 grammer, though I never checked in detail. They come with exercises and a lot of audio material in mp3 format.
Taekim's guide is nice too (see post above).
I recommend using multiple sources for grammar. Different views help you understand better and you can even out flaws in one source.
Learn words, not kanji. Sure, you'll have to learn kanji while learning words, but the word is the important part. Knowing details about kanji can be very helpful, but you should only learn these details as you learn words that use the kanji. I also don't recommend actually memorizing english -> kanji (or rather words using kanji) for the more advanced words, not at such an early stage. Simple kanji are helpful to know like that because they appear all over the place and as parts of complex kanji. Complex kanji however take a long time to memorize and you're probably better off learning more important things first. For example I chose not to memorize how to write 看護婦（かんごふ） - female nurse. It's easy to do on the PC because I know the hiragana and my IME does the rest, but a waste of time otherwise. I do recognize the word from the kanji, of course. Kanji like 女 or 今 and so on, basically all of JLPT 5 and most of JLPT 4 kanji I did memorize. Maybe a few too many of the latter ones.
I learn words with Anki for 30-60 minutes daily, between 5 and 15 new words each day. I always open up WWWJDIC and the handwritten kanji search site while doing so, and write the words in there with my graphics tablet. That way I can check my stroke order or the pronounciation if I'm not sure.
Imo grammar is VERY important in Japanese. Much more so than in English. Especially because so many things can be "omitted" in Japanese sentences, it is very important to know proper grammer to figure out what the sentence means. I strongly suggest that you learn grammar properly.
How much kanji you want to remember is all about what goal you have with your studies. As I live and study in Japan, I need to be able to read and write a lot of kanji. But if you just want to be able to communicate in basic Japanese and read simple books and so, you do not need very much knowledge of kanji.
I guess it all comes down to setting goals that suits your needs.
oh i see, you do write them down then (you dont just stare at anki and learn to recognise them).
hrm thats interesting, i didnt know that "words" can consist of multiple kanji, i think i just thought every word has its own single kanji.
my goal is really pursuing this as a hobby. its challenging, progressive and rewarding (to me). as for living/working in japan in the future, its unlikely (im working on a programming degree..), but its a good hobby for me (i go crazy for MMD)
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OfwIkzY.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8EOPHTR.png)
