しあわせ

Romaji is the way of writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet. I have often seen posts on Japanese learning sites debating whether using romaji is a good idea or a bad idea.

I think it has its uses.
Read the rest of this entry »

にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese is an interactive site based around school activities made by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

It is almost completely in Japanese. There are some English explanations of what to do, but otherwise it’s an immersive program. You click on pictures and you get a dialogue or a description written in kana and spoken to you in Japanese at the same time.

Both polite Japanese, the masu desu form, and casual plain Japanese is provided. The children mainly speaking plain form and adults polite form.

It sems to be mainly a teachers resource but I’m sure most students would be able to navigate it by themselves and learn new things. You might need to know your kana, but even then you could read along with the audio to improve your kana and there are learning kana screens as well.

sections include
15. じかんわり（jikanwari – timetable) for telling the time and dates
4. からだのなまえ（parts of the body)
3. トイレ (toilet)
10. きゅうしょく (school lunch)
11. そうじ (cleaning)

There’s a lot of vocabulary here presented in an interesting manner, it’s worth a look. I’ve learnt some new words already.

It needs shockwave and java I think. On my setup some of the voicerecording modules don’t seem to load, but you might have more luck. Also some directories seem to be missing. It also uses frames as well as shockwave which makes it hard to bookmark sections unfortunately. The last update was Heisei13 which I think is 2002 so it’s a bit dormant perhaps.

Today I bought a little shareware program because it was on special offer.

World of Where is a geography quiz program. But the attraction for Japanese learners is that you can run it in Japanese. I bought it to help improve my katakana reading ability. As most places outside Japan have their names in katakana when playing a quiz as well as testing my knowledge of geography I hope it will speed up my sight reading of katakana.

The full program is available for Windows as well as MacOS. It covers the entire globe as political and physical maps although the physical maps could be more detailed I think. There is also a map of the solar system. Besides English and Japanese the program also runs in 10 other languages.

The demo program only allows access to Europe and the full program is a little expensive at $25.
The full program is also a little dissapointing in terms of Japanese as well. Unusually the section on Japan isn’t in Japanese. Also it only covers the main areas like Kantou and Chubu rather than the prefectures. Unfortunatly it can’t be customised or I might have made a more complete Japan map for it.

I don’t regret the $12 I spent, but for a bit of Japanese practice (if you know Europe) is to stick with the demo version.

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.

Nuku is a small program that quizzes you on Katakana and Hiragana characters. You choose which characters to be tested on, then choose the amount of characters to be used in a test and/or a time limit. The program shows you random characters and you have to select the romaji reading of them.
It is very useful to test your ability to recognise characters.

The only way I found to really learn kana was to write them out again and again until I knew them. It takes about 2 weeks to a month. You should also write them out now and again after you’ve learnt them to keep them fresh in your memory.

R. Lampkin, (Contemporary Books)

This is an inexpensive book of 47 crosswords. 24 are Japanese to English and the remainder are English to Japanese. If you already have some vocabulary they are are a fun to revise and figure out new words by trying to fill in the blanks.

If you haven’t managed to master kana a romaji version is also available. One note though the book uses American spelling so it’s color not colour. etc.