Jonathan's Japan Journal • ジョナサンの日本日記

So I'm trying out Anki, the spaced repetition software, again. I tried it for a while before, but found myself unable to keep up with the mountain of work that I made for myself by entering too many words too quickly without keeping up with it everyday. So now I'm going at it again at a bit more relaxed pace—but not too relaxed—and testing everyday or two. I'm very enamored with the fact that you can use it entirely online through the Anki website as well. (The offline client is better for editing and formatting, though.) We'll see how it goes. I'm seeing some improvements already, I can say. It's good software. (As I said before, Anki is a bit RAM-heavy, though.)

While I'm announcing this, like I did before, I might as well post a few links to various Japanese tools that I use often and find useful. It's not a comprehensive list, though.

WWWJDIC is the old standby that everyone knows. However, I've been using the Firefox extension Rikaichan (which uses the same dictionary, EDICT) for a long time now and rarely actually visit WWWJDIC anymore. If you use Firefox and are learning Japanese, Rikaichan is a must-have. If you are not using Firefox and learning Japanese, you must begin using Firefox and use Rikaichan. It's that good. (Search the web for instructions on how to get it to work in Firefox 3, if that's what you're using.)

英辞郎 at Space ALC. The best collection of example sentences I've seen, searchable in Japanese or in English. (Unlike WWWJDIC, it doesn't sense conjugations, though. Tsk.)

goo辞典. The 国語・新語辞書 dictionaries are must-haves. You really must get used to looking at Japanese-Japanese dictionaries as soon as possible if you're learning Japanese. Many times, you'll get a much better picture of things than you would with an English dictionary. But they have an English dictionary too, because there are of course times when the English dictionary just makes a lot more sense.

読売新聞's audio podcast and video podcast. FNN too, to a lesser extent. Japanese news is still very difficult for me, so I'm trying to practice listening to it and watching it more. I need to ramp up the time I'm spending on it, though. I also use 毎日新聞's national news RSS feed, because there are links to the Japanese articles on each article. Nice.

シットコムで笑え！ is a site that is intended for Japanese folks learning English, but happens to be a great site for English speakers looking to strengthen their Japanese as well. Using Friends as its conversational basis, it offers up lines from the show with natural Japanese translations and even offers some useful commentary as well. I'm pretty fond of it.

Of course, I'm open to other suggestions as well ...

Labels: english