しあわせ

JEDict is my new favorite mac-based dictionary reader.
Again it uses data from the EDICT project like WordLookup, but it’s searches are much more powerful and speedy. It doesn’t only search on the first character. It has single kanji searches so you can find the meaning of individual components. It has a built in user dictionary so you can collect word lists. You can search for kanji you don’t know the reading of by using a radical index. It has a built in web browser that allows you to click on a word and get a translation!!! I liked it so much I upgraded my OS version to 10.4 in order to use it.
On the down side it isn’t as well designed as Word Lookup and I find it a bit cluttered and hard to read sometimes. However I think this will improve. The changes between 4.0 and 4.0.1 addressed a lot of things I found difficult.
It is shareware at a very reasonable $25. The unregistered version is completly usable but doesn’t allow you extra dictionaries.
Version 4 needs OSX 10.4 but version 3.8 will run on OS8 and above. (version 3 isn’t as full featured however)

WordLookup
is a bilingual dictionary reader. For Japanese it uses data from the EDICT project coordinated by James Breen at the Monash University in Melbourne Australia. WordLookup allows the user to perform searches on the EDICT data. You will need kana to input a Japanese search or to understand the results of an English search. WordLookup can also read other dictionaries such as English-German and English-Chinese, for details see their site.

WordLookup was once free but since version 3 it is now shareware ($15). As always I’d encourage you to support the author. Unfortunatly in order to search for anything beyond “A” you have to buy a licence.
The best new feature of 3 is that it now stores searches. Very useful when checking the meaning of individual kanji in compounds.

AJALT are the people who publish the Japanese for Busy People series. Here they have a lot of materials online including Flash animations backing up topics in JFBP1. There is a large section on Real World Japanese. These are conversations organised by situation and are covered at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. You can listen to them in small sections or a whole conversation at once. And there are transcripts and pictures to help you out.

This is a language school in Tokyo which quite generously makes a lot of materials available for free on it’s web site. Among these are a series of very short dialogues that are suitable for beginners through to intermediate learners. It’s very hard to find recordings that are suitable for learners so it’s great to have a large amount of recorded material that you might be able to completely understand.

Japan’s national broadcaster has a weekly radio broadcast of Japanese for Beginners and Brush Up your Japanese. The episodes are available on their website.

They have recently redesigned their site and as well as looking so much better now more of the lessons are available online at one time. The previous 14 weeks are available as audio and all the transcripts are available. You still may have to wait a year for the audio to loop around to the episode you want.

Another problem is that the recordings are in real audio format. If you want to save them you will need to record them somehow. On a Mac I can recommend Audio Hijack.

On the plus side NHK will send you a free booklet of transcripts of the Brush Up your Japanese conversations if you fill in a form on the website. The Japanese for Beginners programs are available in many languages not just English.