Steve's Japanese blog: March 2010

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Kanji jisho with stroke animation

I found a new kanji dictionary online that may not be as smooth as jisho.org, but that has flash animations of all the kanji, along with pictures of the printed style and typical handwriting. I haven't really looked for one with this type of functionality before, so it'd be nice to find a better working one. This was the first thing I found after about five minutes of looking.

Yamasa Online Kanji Dictionary

I've been using it to look up the stroke order of the kanji in smart.fm's Japanese Core 2000: Step 3 (which is hard as hell btw). It makes it a lot easier, and I will probably keep doing it. You can follow the animation in the air with your finger, and not waste the paper actually writing it down. I didn't realize I had the stroke order in so many kanji and radicals wrong. It's a good thing I don't ever actually write Japanese.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Ok, I was once again browsing through comments on smart.fm and I found something cool.

forum.koohii.com

It's a tiny little language-learning forum, much like thejapanesepage.com once was. These kinds of places are awesome. There's resource lists, etc. I just like that it's fairly new and not ruined by weeaboos and elitists. I haven't looked at it much, but it seems like something to keep an eye on.

I already have a set of resources that I use, so it seems like the best idea is to find those that work for you and stick with them. Taking a look at new things is good, but you can't spend too much time doing that, cuz you'll never really move forward. I stick with smart.fm and readthekanji as my spaced-repition software. I use jisho.org as my online dictionary. They seem to really work for me. I also have a teacher, watch as much anime as I can, and am pushing through One Piece vol. 1 every now and then. Looking at anything else just makes me panic over how much there is.

Ok, back to study...

Things that have helped me.

Anki - A flashcard system for which you can make your own cards, and which will show them to you just before you're likely to forget them.

Fluent in 3 Months - Benny the Irish Polyglot travels the world learning all sorts of languages to fluency in just 3 months! Visit to learn his secret and what is his current mission is.

AJATT.com - Much like Benny the Irish Polyglot, but focused on Japanese. Attitude, dedication, and immersion are everything. Don't forget fun!

thejapanesepage.com - A forum for learning Japanese. Since it's become huge, I don't really go there anymore, but I still recommend it as a good jumping off point.

guidetojapanese.com - Famous Tae Kim's. This has been an excellent resource for grammer like, ten years, and is now expanding into a guide for Learning Japanese in general. He builds the language from the bottom up, instead of from the outside in. Excellent.

jisho.org - A dictionary that takes Jim Breen's WWWJDIC and makes it much prettier and easier to access. Search by Japanese, English, or Kanji by radicals. NOW WITH STROKE ORDER!

nihonjin - Better than anything or anyone else, they are experts at the language and can help you with anything, as long as they can communicate with you well enough.

classes - While classes helped me make some progress at first, the overall effect has not been great. We parted at odds. Did get me into study abroad program, though.

jdictionary sentence parser - Type in a sentence or even just a bunch of words and it will break them down and define them. Very handy when reading, as it is much quicker than looking up every word alone. Helps a lot with slang and colloquialisms.

readthekanji.com - A kanji quiz site that shows you a kanji or combo in context and asks you to provide the reading. Costs $10 for a lifetime account to go past JLPT4, but I found it worth it.

Anime - or anything subbed or with a translation. It takes lots of vocabulary and grammar to be able to pick sentences apart audibly, but feels really cool when you get there. It's like a fun, ongoing test of your listening comprehension.

Manga - Manga flows like real conversation, so you learn how people talk, and instead of just having the English, you must find it for yourself. This encourages passively learning new words and being more adept at doing so.

TimWerx.net - I've never used this site directly, but whenever it comes up in the google results, it's been a gem.

Google - If your google-fu is strong enough, you can find almost anything. Sometimes the most frustrating problems are solved by the simplest and most obvious searches that you just didn't expect to work.