My secrets of Japanese study

For some reason, today this struck me as a good thing to write a blog post about, since I know a lot of you out there are fellow Japanese students and I might not tell you about every cool thing I find out about.

The beautiful thing about all of these, except for Kanji Sonomama, is that they are free.

So, without further ado, welcome to

~*~Siena's Secrets of Studying Japanese!~*~

Learning hiragana and katakana:
Slime Forest
Well, everyone has to start somewhere. And that somewhere is probably learning how to read hiragana and katakana. I did it with a free game called Slime Forest which is in the style of an oldschool NES RPG in which you fight slimes by typing in the correct kana above their head. It's effective, and fun! Of course, you still have to practice writing them on your own. After you learn hiragana and katakana, you start in on some basic kanji, and while this helped me a little bit, it's overall not a terribly effective way to learn kanji (unless you put in a lot of extra effort to learn the Japanese readings by yourself, which I did...). But for learning to recognize hiragana and katakana quickly, this is definitely the best.

Online dictionaries:
Denshi Jisho (jisho.org)
Jisho.org is definitely the best online Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary, perhaps for the ability to look up example sentences which lets you see how a word or grammar pattern is actually used. It's based off of Jim Breen's dictionary, like every other good Japanese online dictionary. You can also look up kanji by themselves, or search kanji by radical.

Jeffrey's Japanese⇔English Dictionary Server
I still stand by this dictionary even after I discovered jisho.org (it's also based on Jim Breen), because it has a couple extra dictionaries that come in handy, like common names for people and also place names. It's got a bunch of other ones, but those are the ones I use.

Memorizing vocabulary:
Anki
Anki has become a critical part of my everyday studying of Japanese this semester because I have to learn large amounts of new vocabulary every week. Basically you make flashcards on your computer, and they automatically fill in the reading based on your kanji input. You can also customize the cards, so sometimes I add definitions in Japanese, hide the English meaning by making it white, and put both the kanji and the reading on the same side of the card. So, it's very versatile. It's undergone a lot of growth since I first started using it, and now I think it's a pretty solid piece of software. The point is supposed to be long-term memorization using spaced repetition, but I actually use it mostly for short-term... but don't tell anybody.

Viewing and understanding Japanese websites:
Rikaichan
This is a weird category, but Rikaichan completely revolutionized the way I deal with websites in Japanese. It works like popjisho, except it's better because it's a Firefox extension. And it's based on Jim Breen, of course, so it's basically like looking up every word you don't understand on jisho.org just by hovering over it. It's not perfect but it nearly is. It's a little like a crutch, though, and I always make faces when I have to deal with Japanese websites in a browser that doesn't have Rikaichan installed, which of course can't be every browser I use.

Looking up kanji when you don't know the reading/electronic dictionaries:
Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten (漢字そのまま楽引辞典)
Kanji Sonomama is software for the Nintendo DS, but it completely justifies buying a DS if you don't already have one (and if you do, it's a total no-brainer). It's about 1/6th of the price of a normal electronic dictionary and in some ways, is better (but in one fundamental way is worse, which I'll get to). Kanji Sonomama is critical for looking up kanji you don't know the reading for, which is what you'll encounter when you're trying to read anything intended for Japanese-speakers (otherwise you have to look it up by radical and who wants to do that?). So you draw it into your DS and it looks it up and tells you some English meanings. It's that wonderful. It's sensitive to number of strokes, I've discovered, rather than how beautifully you draw your kanji.

The only problem is that if you want to do English -> Japanese lookup, it's rather slow, because you have to look up the word then look up any kanji you don't know, which is likely to be a large amount depending on your level. Of course, if you're talking to someone who speaks Japanese and trying to figure out how to say something, you can just show them your DS and they'll know how to read it, haha.

You can buy this on the Internet, or if you're in Japan you can find it in the real world (I saw it used once for around 2000 yen). Or if you're a bad person, you can ****** it using your *** ****.

Special thanks to anyone who told me about any of these things... Eric, Andy, whoever it was at Kent who was responsible for Rikaichan (I forget), Ricky... the Internet.

以上です。