Learn Japanese Today

You can visit Denshi Jisho at jisho.org.

Some things are just simpler, and easier-to-use versions of other things in a way that makes them immensely successful. Macs did this to PCs, Google to other search engines and the list goes on. You can’t build a better mousetrap, but you can build one with less packaging and less time to setup.

This is essentially what Jisho.org did for Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC dictionary . Jisho.org, also called Denshi Jisho, even uses the same definition files as WWWJDIC, so you know your information is accurate, it just uses the search better and is overall more user friendly.

Ease of Use: 9

The search box for WWWJDIC is intimidating, and fails to highlight the options that are really important. Denshi Jisho trims down the extra stuff you don’t need and leaves you with the three most important options: which dictionary you look in, common words only, and kana/romaji.

The most important of these is “Common Words only,” which is a button that is not made obvious enough on WWWJDIC, and is a button you’ll want to press on 95% of searches. The times when the “Common Word” is not the one you want are few and far between.

Other than that, the site lets you type in Japanese words in romaji, look up kanji by running your mouse over the character, and see sample sentences with the word you looked up with one easy click. Easy. Convenient.

Authenticity: 7

Denshi Jisho has a similar problem to WWWJDIC of not always having the ideal word float to the top, especially if “Common Words Only” isn’t selected. You usually have to scroll down a bit to find a definition that seems appropriate.

However, the example sentences used on DJ are easy to access and well edited, providing a good sense of context. Before you use a word in a paper, look at the sample sentences to see if they make sense.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

Denshi Jisho has all the words from Jim Breen’s dictionary, with the addition of kanji information from other sources. Lots of good stuff.

Price: 10

Ever so free.

Fun: 7

Denshi Jisho is still a dictionary, so you won’t believe me if I tell you it’s too fun. But you get results quickly and there are interesting sample sentences to read, even some funny ones. DJ is far from the mind-numbing despair I get from WWWJDIC.

Overall: 8.7

Although there is room for improvement, mainly in kanji lookup and the order of words that show up on a search, Denshi Jisho is currently my favorite online dictionary. You get all the knowledge of WWWJDIC without the hassle. I recommend.

Okay so maybe you’ve been reading the blog and you want me to review something, either something you like, hate, or are unsure about.

Well now you can tell me all about it with the all new Request a Review Form!

It’s really simple. All I ask is that when you submit something you leave me your name, e-mail, and URL if you have one. I’m not going to publish the e-mail, I just want it so I can send you a mail if I have any questions.

Then you should also give me the name of what you want me to review and the type of thing it is (podcast, radio station, book). Also leave a couple reasons why you’re recommending it as well as a URL where I can read more about it.

If you recommend something good that I end up reviewing, I’ll mention you in the review along with a link to your site. I’m glad to send you the traffic, so recommend some good stuff!

From now on, whenever you feel the need, just click on the tab at the top and request away!

Kuroda (黒田）is one of the 12 free online stations you can listen at MuMix.net .

This station is run by Michihiro Kuroda, popular J-Pop/J-Rock solo star, and former lead singer of the J-Pop group Iceman.

The station has mostly J-Rock, and they play a lot of stuff I like. There’s just one problem that it took me a little while to realize. It only plays Kuroda’s music.

I think this is an excusable mistake on my part, I mean, a lot of J-Rock sounds the same with the vocal boosters and reverb and the incredible use of synthesizers. The nice thing about listening to this station is you can basically base your opinion off 1 or 2 songa.

If you like Kuroda stay, if not, go.

Ease of Use: 9

It’s just 1-click and you can play it with iTunes and Windows Media Player. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Authenticity: 9 

I like listening to this station because Kuroda speaks very clearly and rarely sings very fast. This makes it easy to pick out entire sentences rather than the few words here and there that I usually get from rock songs.

Quantity of Knowledge: 2

If I was comparing this station to other Michihiro Kuroda stations, it would probably get a 9.5 or a 10 in this category because it has just about every one of his songs. Unfortunately for our friend Kuroda, there are other musicians in the world, and maybe even other ones you want to listen to. Sorry buddy.

Price: 10

I’m gonna review something that’s not free soon, I promise! I just got my paycheck…

Fun: 6.5 and decreasing

I got this number by averaging the score I gave after the first 15 minutes of listening, a 9, with the score I gave after the next hour of listening, a 4. Kuroda is actually pretty good, but it’s tedious to listen to any one artist for a long time, so use this station sparingly.

Overall: 7.5

It’s really not that bad to listen to once in a while. You just really need to know how to use moderation.

 
To get Perapera-kun, click here .

So lately I’ve been trying out this new online reading tool called Perapera-kun. Rather than being a straight-up website like rikai.com, Perapera-kun is a Firefox add-on. I apologize to all you guys who don’t use Firefox, but you might want to switch over if you haven’t already. As far as useful plug-ins and add-ons go, the software development being done for Firefox far exceeds any other browser. If you’d like to convert, click here .

Also, remember you need to download a dictionary file for it to work. Download the Japanese-English file here .

Ease of Use: 9.5

Perapera-kun is truly for the really lazy. I mean, who wants to go through all that work of plugging a URL into a reading tool on a different website when you can just right-click? Seriously though, Perapera-kun really gives you instant gratification. Even if there’s just a couple of words in Japanese on a site, you just right-click the word and activate Perapera-kun, and then whenever you mouse over a Japanese word you’ll get a little bubble that pops up and tells you the reading and definition.

Sometimes selecting the thing you want to in a long string of Japanese can be difficult, causing a little more hassle than Rikai. I would probably recommend Rikai for reading something very long, but it’s hard to say no to how fast Perapera-kun has you reading the Japanese. It’s surprising, but the extra couple of sentences it takes to run a site through Rikai can be very off-putting, you may not want to get into it. But if you just have to right-click, then you’re more inclined to do some more Japanese reading. That’s a big plus in my opinion of Perapera-kun.

Authenticity: 8

Perapera-kun has the same problem that most reading tools have that they don’t allow you to distinguish context. The definitions are all correct (use WWWJDIC entries), but you don’t know which one to use if there are multiple. Make sure you know what’s going on with the context of the sentence before thinking you know a word.

Quantity of Knowledge: 9

Uses the same WWWJDIC files as Rikai.com, and therefore knows most words, but has trouble with some prefixes, suffixes, and abbreviations. Watch out for those.

Price: 10

It’s ever so free. However, the creators and coders encourage a small donation at their site .  If you like the reading tool, help them out.

Fun: 9

It’s hard to beat instant gratification for the fun of a reading tool. It’s really liberating to just stay on the same window and be able to understand any Japanese. However, the slight selection problems can be somewhat frustrating.

Overall: 9.1

I’m giving a slight nod to Perapera-kun over Rikai.com, but I still use both of them. If I’m reading a long newspaper article, I usually use Rikai because i think its slightly easier to select words with, then I use Perapera-kun whenever I just run across some Japanese by chance that I want to read. I feel like I’ve some what over-dramatized the selection difficulties with Perapera-kun, because as I use it more, I’ve gotten a lot better with it. It may just take you a little while to get used to.

Anyways, enjoy!

So I’ve been talking a lot lately about this anime I’m watching, Eyeshield 21. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the big draw it has for me is that it’s about American football, something I know a lot about, and so I can just focus on the Japanese. Giant robot shows are all well and good, but you should save them until your nearly fluent. Watch shows with mostly everyday language.

Also, I want to add that this isn’t a regular old anime review. I’m not going to go into character development or art quality or anything like that. This review is for showing you how this anime compares to others for learning Japanese. But, it is REALLY good. The characters are interesting, and I just want to hug Kurita (the big fat lineman that looks like he was drawn by a first-grader) every time he’s on the screen.

Ease of Use: 8

There are a lot of characters that speak in fast, rough male Japanese, which can be hard to interpret, but you have to get used to it sometime. However, the main character and the female characters are usually pretty easy to understand, so you can get sentences for your SRS there. The player on Crunchyroll isn’t ideal for repeating dialogue multiple times, but it doesn’t entirely suck either. I’ll admit at this point, I don’t have a huge amount of experience of mining subtitles from other anime on other players, so I don’t really know. It’s pretty easy to use, could be easier.

Oh. And the subtitle are fantastic.

Authenticity: 6

Again, lots of rough males. This is a way some people talk in Japanese (saying things like ore-sama and temee), but not nearly to the extent shown in this show. The show also has a high tendency towards gimmicky characters, such as an entire team based off ancient Egypt with the pharaoh as the quarterback, and these contrived situations usually lead to contrived dialogue and terrible puns, so watch out for those. Also, a lot of these gimmicky characters tend to speak in weird ways that people don’t usually talk. For example, the aforementioned pharaoh always uses yo instead of ore or some other version of I. Yo means “mine” according to the subtitle, but I haven’t been able to find it in a dictionary. Just watch out for that sort of thing.

Quantity of Knowledge: 7

Well, I’m not sure how to judge this. There are over 140 episodes. Then again, a lot of football related words are in katakana, so I’m inclined not to count them as highly. But generally, there is a pretty high concentration of dialogue in episodes.

Price: 10

Free via CrunchyRoll .

Fun: 10

I’ve been having a ball with this one. I hope you do too.

Overall:8.1

I’m sure there are better shows for learning, but this one is really engaging and not too difficult to pick up stuff from. Also, it’s exceedingly well subtitled, and that’s always good. I really like it, i hope you do too.

You may have noticed that all the pages have disappeared in favor of the brand-spanking new Review Database. I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m really proud of this one.

I’m not a big-time programmer, so this is really my first foray, and I think it turned out pretty well. One of the things I’m doing at the paper for work is designing a database for all sorts of contact information for local officials. After a long day of coding, I decided to let off some steam…by doing more coding. But this was a lot more fun.

I really like this because now, rather than have to add each new review to a page, I can just pop it in the database and it’ll update right on the site. Better for me, better for you.

Anyways, enjoy the review database with full search and sortability. Oh yeah. This is the big time. Either click the tab or click here.

You can find this station here.

Listening to Japanese as often as you can is important for getting good at Japanese. Just surrounding yourself with spoken Japanese presents you with an opportunity to absorb it without thinking about it constantly. That’s right, you don’t really have to focus on what’s being said to learn, I mean, it helps, but listening while you’re working out or writing on your blog can still help you become more familiar with the language.

So listening to Japanese is a good thing. There are lots of cool bands and CDs you can buy, so you should definitely start building your collection. But what happens when you don’t have your CD collection with you and you still want to listen to Japanese. Well, that’s why kamisama invented Internet radio.

You see, at my work, I can’t bring in my Japanese CDs and my iPod is currently broken, so I’ve been listening to a lot of internet radio. The new site that I’m listening to is called Armitage’s Dimension, and so far I like it a lot. It’s a station geared towards Japanese Pop/Rock/Anime music. The cool thing about it is that it’s entirely request driven, so the songs you hear are usually pretty solid.

Ease of Use: 8.5

The reason I first started using AD was that it was so easy to get started. You click the listen button on the homepage and there you are. You don’t have to make an account, although you should, and many media players are supported. Making an account is very easy, and then you’ll be requesting songs in no time. My only gripe is that the title of the song is listed last, rather than first, so it makes it tougher to find the song you’re looking for. Overall though, very user friendly.

Authenticity: Depends

The authenticity really depends on the song, so I don’t feel comfortable assigning a numeral. Be careful with songs from anime, especially theme songs, most of them are fine, but don’t learn about rocket-propelled grenades unless you absolutely have to. Again, this station presents you with real Japanese music, so the failings in authenticity are in the music, not the station. Therefore, this category doesn’t really apply, yeah Todd, thanks for wasting my time.

Quantity of Knowledge: 6

If you’re looking for anime music, change that 6 to a 9. Otherwise, keep it that way. The music database for this station is entirely user-updated, which has its ups and downs. There are lots of categories (like anime music) and artists that are absurdly fleshed out, while there are other glaring holes. For example, this stations displays a catastrophic lack of The Blue Hearts, one of my favorite Japanese bands of “Linda Linda” fame, but they have just about every album for another band I really like, L’arc en Ciel. Also, the fact that the database is user-maintained means that it doesn’t have all the late-breaking current singles from Japan. Instead, it feels like a favorite Japanese music playlist on your iPod, which is nice at times.

Price: 10

Oh it’s obscenely free. Have you noticed I’ve been reviewing a lot of free things lately? Guess who doesn’t have money to throw around…just kidding. I just generally feel that if you’re already putting in so many hours into study, it shouldn’t cost you a bunch of money as well to learn Japanese. P.S. I just bought myself a new sousaphone for marching around town, and it’ll be here in a week. *excited*.

Fun: 9.5

I really like the way the request feature works on this station. You can request something and then generally hear it within 5 or 6 songs. It’s not quite instant gratification, but it’s close. And if you hear a song you like, you can add it to your favorites, and then request it quickly in the future when you want to hear it again. It’s a lot of fun fleshing out your favorites and listening to whatever song is stuck in your head. And of course, it’s always great to hear any anime soundtrack you may want to, good times.

Overall: 8.6

Again, I’m going to stress the “greatest hits” feel this station has, as opposed to current stuff. But, by being entirely request based, you know that the song you are listening to is a song someone really likes, so its a good way to discover new music. Also the community on the website is pretty solid, and there are a lot of other Japanese students there. This site is definitely good at what it does, so I like it a lot. Too bad about The Blue Hearts…