Welcome to the Japanese Language, Culture and Music forum! + Useful Links

[Chris Beveridge]

Welcome to the Japanese Language, Culture and music forum!

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Finally, if you have any questions, feel free to contact the moderators. We're glad to help.

Happy posting!

[qazxsw]

Eh... slow work day...

Here are some of my fav, use 'em, post other links here...

Japanese news in English:
<ul type="square">[*]Japan Times
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
Clean, with some interesting editorials.[*]Yahoo News Japan
http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&amp...&amp;cat=japan
Basically a Yahoo news filter that just grabs anything that has to do with Japan from Yahoo News.[*]Japan Today
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=home
Not as good as Japan Times, more sensationalized.[*]Mainichi
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/
Also sensationalized... Think tabloids. (Don't even get me started on the waiwai garbage.)[/list]Japanese Language Utilites
<ul type="square">[*] Jim Breen's WWWJDIC
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html
Very useful online Japanese dictionary. In particular students should check out the Find Kanji Multiradical method. Easier than looking up in Nelson's.[*] Rikai
http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl
Paste in Japanese text, get the text back with mouse scrollover kanji readings and translations. Very useful![*] Alternative sci.lang.japan FAQ
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/afaq/afaq.html
Lotsa good stuff here. Every wonder where arubaito came from?[/list]http://www.joyo96.org/
Good stuff here. A work in progress with great charts and kana and kanji references. You can make printable kanji practice sheets with the kanji and a bunch blank squares to practice writing in.[*]Kanjiclinc's top twelve Kanji Sites
http://www.kanjiclinic.com/toptwelve.htm
A virtual smorgasbord of kanji sites. Some repeats from above as well.[/list]Japanese software I use
<ul type="square">[*]JEDict for Mac OS, Mac OS X
http://jedict.com
Possibly the best software based kanji and word dictionary I have used. Based off of Breen's electronic dictionary files, you can search kanji by radical, strokes, sounds, and a bunch of other ways. Word searches can be limited to common words (about 20,000 entries) or the full dictionary. New versions support example sentences for many, many words. Shareware, but some of the best money I have spent on SW. If I only had one dictionary, this would be it.[*]JWPce for Windows
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/jwpce.html
Free. A Japanese word processor with built in word dictionary. Definitely worth the price. [/list]At time of posting, all links verified to be valid.

Mod Edit: Changed Subject Line

[scarrow]

A very good site for working on your Japanese vocabulary is:

http://www.kantango.com

You can make your own vocabularly lists and then view them in flashcard form or create written tests. You can also view other people's public vocabularly lists and, if you desire, copy them to your own. Romanji, kana and kanji friendly.

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[JohnAD]

[ QUOTE ]
qazxsw said:
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/
Also sensationalized... Think tabloids. (Don't even get me started on the waiwai garbage.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Wai Wai rules! Considering that they are just reprinting articles from other magazines, I wouldn't be too harsh on them. Plus, it's good for a laugh or two.

John.

[jmarken]

7/11/03--I've had a request to pin this, which I thought sounded reasonable, especially if people can keep it relatively up to date.

9/29/03--Changed some of the subject lines to make them more useful. Also got rid of the link (and the replies to that post) to the site that was trying to install Gator.

9/9/04--Almost a year and only two dead links! Pretty good. Anyway, all links are now verified as working as of 9/9/04. I also added a post with Quen's keyboard shortcuts for the Japanese IME.

[qazxsw]

Forgot one, since I haven't needed to use it in a while.

If your computer doesn't have Japanese fonts installed, you can use this filter to redisplay a page with graphics replacing Japanese characters. It works surprisingly well, but slow connections will have trouble. Just change the www.yahoo.co.jp to any link you want.

http://lfw.org/shodouka/http://www.yahoo.co.jp/

Mod Edit: Link seems to be dead. Can't seem to find a working Shodouka on Google either. Maybe it will come back one day.

Chinese/Korean/Japanese display and input support for PalmOS:
http://www.dyts.com/en/
Insanely good...automatically adds Shift-JIS support to all applications. I'm still running in the shareware demo but it's been great for sakura taisen translations.

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Japanese news in English:
<ul type="square">[*]Daily Yomiuri http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/index-e.htm[*]The Asahi Shinbun http://www.asahi.com/english[/list]
Television station in English:
<ul type="square">[*]NHK http://www.nhk.or.jp/englishtop[*]Nippon Television http://www.ntv.co.jp/english/index.html[*]TBS http://www.tbs.co.jp/index.html[*]FUJI Television http://www.fujitv.co.jp/en/index.html[*]TV Asahi (Dead Link Removed)[*]TV Tokyo http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/corporation/[/list]
Translation service:
<ul type="square">[*]Amikai,Inc http://www.amikai.com/index.jsp?lang=EN[*]AltaVista http://babelfish.altavista.com/[/list]

Mod Edit: Removed the link to TV Asahi. Can't find an English page for them (other than the page in English about the company itself).

Another free translation service:
http://www.nifty.com/globalgate/

I find that sometimes it works a little better than Altavista, plus it leaves the original text on the page as well, so if the translation is really bad, you can compare the translation and the original yourself. The first choice in the pull-down menu is English to Japanese, and the second is Japanese to English.

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[jupiterstar]

The Pera-Pera Penguin segment from the Daily Yomiuri has nice printouts for learning conversational grammar and vocabulary.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/0002/

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Mod Edit2: Fixed broken link