しあわせ

Not really to do with learning Japanese, but Go is part of Japanese culture. This is an absorbing game with rules simple enough to be grasped in 30 mins but with strategy complex enough to last a lifetime. It is also the only game I’ve come across with a handicapping system that can give an enjoyable and challenging game for both opponents when one is experienced and the other is a novice.

Goban is a mac implementation of GNU Go. It is very elegant and much more convenient sometimes that getting out the board and stones. You can play against the program, or use it to play against opponents locally, on the internet or on your LAN.
If you like chess or strategic games I’d recommend you give Go a try.

This is a small shareware program that allows you to make flashcard sets, organise them and run them on your Mac. It’s based around the concept of cards that have a question on one side and answer on the other that you use to quiz yourself on vocabulary. (Something that I don’t remember from school but it’s better than reading and trying to memorise whole lists.).

One of the advantages of a computer based system is you can have more than two sides to a card and can keep track of the ones you know more easily. You can print out your cards if you want and can also export them to an iPod. (But large text files don’t seem to work well on my first generation iPod and are very slow to load and scroll). Another good feature of iflash is that the author keeps a site where he encourages users to upload and download card sets and there are a number of good Japanese sets.

iFlash only costs $15 and I think it’s well worth it.

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.

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)

LightWayText is a simple word processor. Easily as functional as MacWrite which was all I once ever needed. It was written by a Japanese programmer so it has features that can be hard to find in American programs. (It’s might not be as full featured as something as bloated as Word, but who uses all those features anyhow?)

It is available for both Mac and Windows. (You will need Japanese fonts and system support installed.)
It is shareware and costs US$25, (UK￡14). I don’t think the unregistered version is hampered too much but at such a low price for a program I’d encourage you to register and support the programmer’s work. (You could even surprise Yumi-san and make a nice comment in Japanese! You’ll get the most personable support you’ve ever gotten from a shareware developer.)

The web sites are a bit basic but the program is very good.

It is available as a Japanese version. (All menus and dialogs in Japanese.) For the very brave.

And is also available in English, French and Italian versions.