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.

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…

The Daily Yomiuri is available in English and Japanese .

To read the Japanese version, I recommend utilizing Rikai.com’s reading tool .

Alright, I just had a long day at work, so I’m just gonna get right to it.

Ease of Use: 8

The big thing working against The Daily Yomiuri is that the articles aren’t directly linked to their translations on the English site. Delays for translation can be as brief as a weekend or as long as three days, so the way I usually go about is I find an article that looks interesting on the English web site. I read the headline, then I got try to find it on the Japanese site. The best way is to go under the respective section that best describes the story:　    社会 (society)、スポーツ(sports)、経済(business)、政治(politics), and hit CTRL+F and type in Japanese a name or a place from the English article. As far as I can tell, national Japan news is translated within an hour or so, while most other stuff is put up within a day or so.

For example, I just read a headline about a girl who stabbed her father to death in Kawaguchi. I then typed 川口 into my “Find” box after clicking on the 社会 tab, and found the Japanese story from three days ago. It’s a pretty interesting one, here’s the English article , the Japanese article , and the follow-up Japanese article that hasn’t been translated in yet in which it is discovered the young murderess had a collection of “occult manga.” And you though Deathnote was just for fun.

Note that all of these articles are already put through Rikai. I know. You’re welcome.

Authenticity:8

I’m inclined to say that you don’t get much more authentic than an actual Japanese newspaper, but you don’t just hand a third-grader an issue of the New York Times and expect him/her/it to just pick it up. And then how are you supposed to feel when your third-grader is struggling to use ‘ombudsman’ in a sentence. What’s that? You don’t know that one? Well…yeah, I just learned that today. We had the ombudsman from NPR give a talk to the newsroom staff today. It was awesome.

Back to the point, unless you’re at a level of reading fluency where you can comfortably read a Japanese newspaper, a lot of the vocabulary will be pretty advanced for you. However, these are the words and the kanji you need to know to read a newspaper, so you better learn them sometime. Not to toot my own journalism horn, but who do you think you are if you can’t even read the paper?

Quantity of Knowledge: 9.5

So I started reading this one article, about the regulations of the Ministry of Defense’s Ground Self-Defense Force and there was one word I knew in the first paragraph. This is just to let you know what your getting into. There are going to be a lot of proper nouns that you won’t even know in English, so if you’re just getting started, stick to the murdering kids.

There’s plenty of stuff out there to read though once you’re good enough.

Price: 10

Such a free website. So good.

Fun: 6

This can really depend on the article. I had a lot of fun reading about the murdering kid and her manga. Reading about the Ministry of Defense was like getting an anal probe. Read what you like.

Overall: 8.3

If you’re good enough to read these articles in Japanese without Rikai, then CONGRATULATIONS! Go start your own blog. For those of us that have to struggle, this is like one of those scholarly journals in the library. You never really feel like sitting back and cracking one open, but if you put in the hours you’ll really be rewarded.

Now doesn’t that look like the kind of guy you want to learn Japanese from? His name is Todd (like me) Rudick, and he is the developer of my favorite Japanese reading tool. Essentially, he started with the quandary of furigana, which, besides being the namesake of a dictionary I reviewed recently, are kana characters that show the reading of kanji in tiny lettering above them. Furigana are obviously helpful if you don’t know the kanji, but there is a tendency to only look at the furigana, rather than the kanji they represent, which is a significant roadblock. Rudick thought that if somehow you could make the furigana invisible, so you could only see it when you needed it, it would solve the problem, so he started out by creating things like this.

かん　じ
漢字

Try selecting the area of text where furigana would be, right on top of the kanji, and there it is! Your secret furigana. Obviously this would be a lot of work to keep doing on a large scale, and luckily for us, Todd Rudick became a software engineer and designed the Rikai.com reading tool. The premise behind the Rikai.com reading tool is that rather than having hidden furigana, the kana reading as well as the English definition pop up when you run your mouse over a kanji. It’s pretty cool, check it out here.

On to the review:

Ease of Use: 9

What I really like about the Rikai.com reading tool is how little you have to worry about getting the text in the right format. Everything goes into the reader as plain text, so, for example, you can copy and paste the list of links on the sidebar on a Japanese website without having to worry about dealing with the hyperlinks. You can also just enter in a web address, and it’ll open up the page and whenever you run your mouse over a Japanese word, you’ll get the reading and definition, which is really neat. The only problem is that sometimes, depending on how the site is coded, the information about the Japanese word gets blocked out by other material on the website, making it hard to read. When that happens, I recommend just copying and pasting stuff from the website. It’s quite easy.

Authenticity: 8

The definitions are accurate, but the reader can’t distinuish context, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. This is the main thing that separates a reading tool from a translator. This reader just gives you all the possible readings and definitions of a kanji compound, you have to figure out what context is being used on your own. On the one hand, you could get confused and learn the wrong reading by accident, but on the other, it forces you to really know what context is going on, and thereby learn Japanese better.

Quantity of Knowledge: 9

Not only do you get every reading and definition when you mouseover a kanji compund, you also get the individual meanings of each individual character, as well as other compounds that character is in. It’s a really cool feature that lets you really understand how kanji compounding works. I’m a big fan.

Price: 10

Oh yeah, it’s free.

Fun: 8

This tool makes reading FUN!!!! Obviously how much fun you have is going to be directly related to what you’re reading, but this not only lets you have fun feeling like you’re reading Japanese, but it also lets you surprise yourself at how well you can read without mousing over words. Achievement = Fun.

Overall: 9

I think this is a really good reading tool, not only for the information it offers you, but also for the information it doesn’t offer you. It will give you all sorts of information, but you have to do the brain work to figure out what the sentence is trying to say from all the components, which is great for learning how Japanese works. Give it a try.

It’s hard for me to do this, but I’m willing to let you in on the best kept secret for learning Japanese on the web. To work on your listening, you can’t get much better than watching subtitled Japanese TV shows, and crunchyroll.com is the place to do that. Crunchyroll offers hundreds of East Asian dramas and anime, fully subbed, for you to peruse free of charge. Make sure you don’t just read the subtitles, listen to the Japanese first and then look to check. Anyways, on to the review:

Ease of Use: 7.5

The site sorts its shows into anime and drama, and has an alphabetic index for each category, but you can’t search and you can’t sort by Japanese/Chinese/Korean and you can’t separate movies from TV shows, but these things aren’t too much of a problem, just make sure you don’t learn Korean by accident.

Authenticity: 7

The authenticity is, of course, dependent on the show/movie you choose to watch. In some cases it will teach you a lot of relevant colloquialisms and slang that are hard to find other places, but it can also mess up your Japanese. Just remember that what’s right for a gal in Shibuya is not necessarily right for you, and talking like Naruto NEVER makes you sound cool.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

I dare you to try to watch all the shows and movies on this site, oh wait, no I don’t, that’d be a good way to get convicted of 3rd degree murder. What I mean is that there are more subtitled Japanese shows and movies on this site than you can possibly watch. There’s also some sweet game related videos too, which are cool even without teaching you Japanese.

Price: 10

The best thing is that all of this is for free. You can even watch the videos in hi-def. You used to have to pay for it, but the guys over at crunchyroll decided to make it free. You can still become a member and be first party to their beta features (not really worth it), but I would recommend signing up if you have the extra money. These guys deserve it.

Fun: 10

What’s more fun than watching TV? Oh yeah, watching Japanese TV. Nothing will make you want to practice your Japanese more than being caught up in a great drama or anime. For drama reviews check out my homey Kumo at kumojapandrama.blogspot.com

Overall: 9.2

This site is great as long as you know how to watch drama or anime as a student of Japanese rather than a regular Gaijin. I would put this higher if you had the ability to single out the Japanese stuff on the site, but as I said earlier, its only I minor problem. Enjoy!

Today we’ll be taking a look at one of the internet’s largest and most popular Japanese dictionaries, WWWJDIC . This dictionary was created by Jim Breen of Australia’s Monash University, and is the web’s authority for Japanese word look-up. Without furthur ado, let’s go to the review.

Ease of Use: 6

This dictionary has easily twice as much info as any other on the web, but getting to it is another story. I tried to find the word 楽しい(tanoshii), by typing in its definition of ‘fun’. These were some of the results I got:

興味索然 【きょうみさくぜん】 (adj-t,adv-to) uninteresting; tending to spoil the fun (pleasure) (of); throwing a wet blanket (on)
茶化す 【ちゃかす】 (v5s) to poke fun at; to make fun of 
ファンファール(P); ファンファーレ (n) (1) fanfare (ger:); flourish of trumpets; (2) fun fair;

The list goes on, but the target word, tanoshii, does not appear until the twentieth entry. Checking the box marked ‘Common words’ brings it up to the 9th entry, and only by also checking the ‘Exact word-match’ box does it become the second entry. You would think they would put the most common and exact matches at the top, but that’s just not how this dictionary rolls. Typing in a Japanese word and searching for its english definition is much more effective than the other direction, but I find myself looking for a Japanese word much more often. Also, the kanji-finder seems needlessly complex and always takes me a while to use. The Japanese reading tool and hand-written kanji finder are pretty efficient, but they aren’t the main focus of the dictionary.

Authenticity: 6

This dictionary will always have the right word somewhere, but it won’t tell you which one it is, leaving you to find it yourself. Let’s look back at the example of tanoshii, even after I checked the boxes for ‘Common words’ and ‘exact word-match’ it was still only the second entry, the first was this:

ファン (n) (1) fan; (2) fun;

If there’s one surefire way to have a Japanese person think you don’t know Japanese, its to speak in katakana phonetic conversions like the one above aka (dog = ドッグ(doggu)、cat = カット(katto)). ファン is an acceptable word for ‘fan’, as in ’sports fan.’ It is not really an acceptable word for fun, and certainly not if you’re trying to convince people you know Japanese. Finding the right word in this dictionary basically requires you to know the right word.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

You just can’t argue with this one. There are so many entries, most of which are equipped with example sentences and conjigations. On top of that is a reading tool, kanji dictionary, and even a dictionary you can use from your cell phone. If you can’t find a word in a smaller dictionary, odds are it will be here. This is a good last resort.

Price: 10 (free)

Yes, it’s free, but the 10 score is assuming you don’t put a price on your time. It takes a while to get what you want out of this beast.

Fun: 2

I know dictionaries aren’t supposed to be fun, but using WWWJDIC frequently puts me in a bad mood. Sometimes I find what I’m looking for right  away, but other times it makes me wish for a less thorough dictionary. Again, most of the other tools aren’t as frustrating as the English-Japanese, but that’s the one I usually use.

Overall: 6.5

I have to give credit where credit is due because of the ridiculous amount of stuff you can find at WWWJDIC, but because its so difficult to use, I’d really recommend it only for obscure words that you know aren’t commonly used.