しあわせ

Do you miss out small tsu?
Forget when to lengthen a vowel?
Use the wrong voicing?
Help may be at hand from Purdue University. It is an old project (the last update was 2002) but they have available custom dictionaries for Japanese IME systems. I downloaded the extra dictionaries for Kotoeri. They also have files for Windows XP.
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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.
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Desktop Poet is a fun little program from Mariner Software. It replicates those little packs of magnetic words you find in bookshops that allow you to compose poetry on your fridge. This program allows you to do the same on your computer. And as such is much more convenient.

As words can be imported from simple text files I thought it might be interesting to use it to play at making sentences to improve my Japanese grammar and reading. Haiku or any poetry might be a bit advanced.
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Anki
暗記 [あんき] (n,vs) memorisation, learning by heart.

This is a flashcard program that was written by someone specifically to help him learn Japanese. It’s free, and runs on Windows Linux and Mac. Apparently there’s also a version for mobile phones but I can’t find or comment on how that works.

As sample card decks there is vocabulary for various JLPT stages and Heisig kanji learning system. I think the help files could be better and his terminology clearer but it’s fairly simple to make your own decks and add to decks. Pictures and sound can be added.

There is also a dictionary lookup of online dictionaries but the ALC site doesn’t seem to work for me. It might not like my browser. (The error is in Japanese and I can’t really be bothered to figure it out past だめ or 禁止 or whatever it’s saying. )

The main benefit of the program is “spaced repetition”. This is where cards are shown to you at the ideal time for you you to memorise them. There’s no point in reviewing a well known word so the program tries to show you it just before you forget it. — There’s better explanations on Anki’s site.
Its hard to evaluate the method by which the program does this but I’m willing to trust it.

I use iFlash on the mac at the moment and really like it. It also has spaced repetition based on a score. Anki might be a replacement as iFlash has become a little dormant. (however he’s promising an iPhone version when development opens up on that platform which’d be enough for me to get an iPod touch perhaps.)
But at the moment I think I prefer iFlash’s list view; which alllows me an easy overview and multiple card sides; which allows me to store notes and examples easily. However this might be possible in Anki as well.

Finally Anki has pretty good statistics features to chart your progress which would be a good incentive to learning I think.

Check it out!

NoteBook 2.1 from Circus Ponies Software

I use my MacBook a lot to learn Japanese. I’ve got so many clippings from websites, stray urls, little notes I’ve written scattered all over my harddrive. I’ve also got loads of barely organised pieces of paper with notes. The solution? NoteBook!

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