Group items tagged

"nciku has prepared bilingual versions of a number of classic public-domain short stories, including stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Happy Prince and other tales by Oscar Wilde, and other short stories by O Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. We provide English and Japanese versions of each paragraph, so you can easily see the translation for the part of the story you're reading, as well as listen to an audio recording of each story in its original language or select English or Japanese text with your mouse to see a translation of that word. "

Type in a website address or Japanese text and Rikai will load it with mouseover definitions for Japanese characters.

"When typing in Japanese, your iPhone uses names and readings from your address book as a kind of second dictionary for its text auto-complete. This was a very smart way to program the iPhone since the most common reason to use non-standard kanji/words to begin with is because they're used that way in a proper name (which, if it's someone/someplace/somewhere you know, would probably be in your address book anyway)."

rikaichan is a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary extension for Firefox. Features: * Simple to use, just hover the mouse on top of a Japanese word. * Automatically de-inflects verbs and adjectives. * Has an optional toolbar that allows you to manually type the word to lookup. * Detailed kanji view shows meaning/keyword in English, on/kun readings, and other information. * Hiragana, katakana and half-width katakana are treated the same making it possible to lookup stylized/emphasized words.

Tofugu's first annual "Top 10 Online Resources for Learning Japanese for Free" list, which includes an e-book that's available for download at the end of the article. There's also video down there for all you people who don't like reading things!

Good collection of links to reading resources, such as open content textbooks, folk tales, children's stories, as well as links to tools to support reading, such as addng furigana to kanji.

Kanji alive is a free, web-based tool to help beginning and intermediate level Japanese language learners to read and write kanji. It is cross-platform and will run in any browser that supports Adobe Flash and Apple Quicktime. Please Note: The current version of Kanji alive available on this site is an initial beta or pilot version. We are making it available now in order to solicit comments and suggestions from our users. It is not a dictionary: only searches for individual kanji, not words. Shows character in font and animation of handwriting, on/kunyomi, audio clips & translations of associated compound words, radicals, stroke count and breakdown, and grade level/reference numbers for kanji lists.

Add on for Firefox that provides popup dictionary help for reading Japanese, Chinese, and (coming soon) Korean on webpages.

Links to study materials for MIT's Japanese courses, 1st-4th year. Includes interactive practice quizzes, kanji study and quizzes, readings with audio, and photographic vocabulary aids.

Tangorin is a free online Japanese dictionary and learning tool that combines basic Words and Kanji search with Example Sentences. It features a search interface that works by selecting multiple frequently appearing character elements - the Multi-Radical Words and Multi-Radical Kanji search. It's the easiest and fastest way to find complex words without the need to read or understand the kanji.

"Learn Japanese the fun way! * Learn hiragana and katakana in two weeks * Improve your kana IME reading speed * Review JLPT kanji and vocabulary in context * Learn to correctly use particles and counters" (Software)

Copy and paste text to get a vocabulary glossary for your reading. Does bilingual lookup for Japanese-English, -German, -Dutch, and -Slovenian, and -Spanish. Can also analyze text for vocabulary and kanji level (for JLPT) and structure.

Recipes written in easy to understand Japanese.

"For teachers: You make pages in Japanese of JIS, Shift-JIS or EUC-JP codes without furigana only. Upload the pages to your web server. Put your web URLs on above text box. Then you can get pages with furigana by kids.goo.ne.jp. "

Japanese children's website - good reading material for learners.

A website to support the reading of Matsuo Basho's travel diary "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" (Oku no Hosomichi). For each of the 44 stations in the text, user's can view 5 different English translations, discussion of the text in English, related images and the origianl Japanese. The primary translation is by Nobuyuki Yuasa, from The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Developed at the University of Oregon

This is a simple trainer for learners of Japanese to improve their recognition speed of hiragana and katakana. The program is still under development and we welcome any feedback from users. 1. Choose ひらがな or カタカナ. 2. Set a speed for your flash card from a pulldown menu. (Available speeds range from three seconds to 0.1 second with 0.1 second increment. ) 3. Read each letter aloud. You must keep up with the speed you set. There is no feedback.

News from NHK written in simple Japanese.

Website that sells Japanese eBooks and accepts foreign credit cards. There are also quite a few free titles, including cases where first book in manga series is free, etc.

A Japanese-language newspaper online.