しあわせ

Do you have Japanese friends? If so ask them if they use Mixi and see if they’ll give you an invitation.

Mixi is a Japanese social networking site. Although there are a fair amount of gaijin on it, it is totally japanese. It is also invitation only. Someone who is already a member has to invite you in; you can’t set up an account yourself.

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This can be useful for making practice sheets of kanji.
It is a font made by Tim Eyre showing as the title says the stroke orders in kanji. This link is to his home page from where you can download the font.

I’ve found I like writing in Japanese. If I have to learn vocabulary I may as well (try to) learn the kanji that goes with it. Certainly if I’m writing I’ll use kanji if I can. I might not remember them to write afterwards but I can usually recognise them again if I’m reading.

Some really good writing surfaces are bananas and wet sand.

For advanced credit you can write on people!
(see “The Pillow Book” directed by Peter Greenaway, 1991)

But anything as permanent as a tattoo is a very bad and stupid idea.
For reasons why having something permanently written on your body in a language you probably don’t understand, these pranks about Chinese tattoos are good illustrations.

I think this means Aoyagi mountain font. Its a full kanji font in a fluid dry brushed style. (Well maybe not every kanji but a large amount of them.) Not an everyday font but in the right circumstances would look good. No idea what the terms of use are; again its a completely Japanese site. But from what I can make out its free 無料 and presented to the public 公開. Available in OpenType and Windows TrueType.

A design group that makes many fonts for free download, mainly katakana display faces but there is one kanji font albeit without the full range of glyphs. The display fonts show just how difficult a language can be to read in unfamiliar fonts.

–update 29Apr08–

The kana display fonts are directly mapped to keys; therefore you type the characters directly rather than using Kotoeri input (or the IME in Windows). Leaving your keyboard in romaji input, select the font as AL (Roman characters) HA (Hiragana glyphs) or KT (Katakana glyphs) then type away.

This is one time a Japanese keyboard is really useful as the kana glyphs are printed on the keys.

This is the layout of the keyboard I have.
An Apple Japanese wireless keyboard.

The underlying keyboard layout is the US keyboard.

Unfortunately the voiced characters using ゛and ゜are found using the shift key so a bit of guesswork is needed to find them especially for あいうえお and the ま row.