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Language Tools
Mangajin magazine
Article on learning Japanese online
Writers become accustomed to watching magazines disappear. Many deserve their unhappy fate, but Mangajin, which passed on a few years ago, was an exception. Its conceit was using Japanese manga to help native English speakers learn colloquial Japanese. In every respect -- content, graphics, editing -- it was a first-class operation. Each issue also contained general-interest articles about Japanese culture. I co-authored this piece for them on the best free websites for learning Japanese.
LEARN JAPANESE ON THE WEB (1997)
With web pages now devoted to seemingly every aspect of human existence, it's no surprise that a number of sites try to teach Japanese. While resources for studying basic conversation and kana predominate, there are also pages that offer intermediate kanji and grammar lessons. Several of the sites are surprisingly sophisticated, and make excellent use of the Internet's capabilities, including graphics, sound, and video.
Don't throw away your Japanese textbooks or CD-ROMs, however. These sites can only supplement more traditional learning media, not replace them -- not yet, anyway. Still, there are definitely pages that help you learn Japanese in a fun, creative way.
Before we begin, a few words about how you can view Japanese characters on a web page. For those who have "non--Japanese" computers (that's most of us), the easiest way is to use a Japanese add-on program like NJWIN, KanjiKit/Union Way, or Twinbridge. All of these programs create a quasi-Japanese environment on English operating systems like Windows. Macintosh users can install Apple's Japanese Language Kit, an extension to Apple's Macintosh Operating System 7.1 or later. Another path is provided by the Shodoka Launchpad, which supplies Japanese characters on-line. For a more complete guide to these methods of viewing Japanese characters, please take a look at a web page prepared by Haitani Kanji, coauthor of this article. Links to all web sites mentioned here are also available on that page: http://home.earthlink.net/~haitani/mangajin.html.
Practicing Kana
An excellent site to learn or review the pronunciation and stroke order of hiragana and katakana (the Japanese "alphabets") is the Language Room of the Kids Japan site. Yes, the site is directed at children, but don't let that turn you off: the language discussion is straightforward and useful, even if it's sometimes a bit, well, childish. The Speaking Japanese section features clear, bright charts of the hiragana and katakana. Click on the audio link underneath any kana and a quick-loading AU file pronounces the sound for you. While you're visiting, practice pronouncing some simple daily expressions (like "Ohayo gozaimasu"), basic numbers, and so on. (Other sites that provide similar materials include 3 Web's Japanese Language Course, Japanese Online, and Japanese VAL BALLOON.)
To improve your kana-writing skills, be sure to visit the well-designed Japanese Writing Tutor. The introductory commentary by webmaster Blake Edward Sterzinger is perceptive and amusing. He has put together a series of animated GIF files ("brief cartoons on an endless loop") that show you how to write each kana. As you watch a Japanese ink brush crisply draw the kana in a large box, you can mimic its movement with your pen or pencil on paper. The GIFs are supplemented with stroke-by-stroke written instructions. To view the moving brush, you must have a browser that supports frames and animated GIFs. (If the little red origami crane on the homepage is flapping its wings, you're golden.)
For more aesthetically pleasing Japanese characters, visit the Gahoh page, managed by Kanai Masayoshi. The stroke order of the kana (along with some kanji) are elegantly, albeit slowly, displayed by QuickTime movie files. The brush strokes used in Gahoh are those of true Japanese calligraphy, and thus the student gains a sense of the beauty and art of Japanese penmanship. (If you visit the kana tables on the English pages. click on the kana ka to access the five kana in the ka column -- that is, ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko. The Japanese pages, in contrast, display the entire kana tables.)
Learning Kanji
A student graduating from kana to kanji is like a ballplayer going from the minors to the majors. The learning emphasis shifts from mere pronunciation to the recognition, readings, and meanings of characters. Meanwhile, the problems of learning proper stroke order multiply.
Start out by returning to the Japanese Writing Tutor. You can search for a given kanji by (1) subject (e.g., numbers, planets, etc.); (2) on (Sino-Japanese) and kun (Japanese) readings; (3) radical; and (4) stroke count. (Play around a bit with the Subject lookups; they're organized rather creatively and provide additional insight to the characters.) Once you find the kanji you want, just click on it. As with the kana, the moving brush shows the stroke order and teaches you how to write it.
While the Japanese Writing Tutor is excellent, at present it includes fewer than 100 kanji. Gahoh's kanji section, by contrast, displays the stroke order of some 350 characters. The authors of both programs seem to be adding new characters steadily.
For a more systematic study of the kanji, visit the Joyo 96 Japanese writing study site. The joyo kanji consist of 1,945 characters designated by Japan's Ministry of Education as "general-use characters." About 120 joyo kanji -- all those studied by Japanese first graders, and many of those learned in the second grade -- are included at the Joyo 96 site. These characters are divided into lessons, each of which contains 15 kanji. Clicking a character takes you to a page showing detailed information for that kanji, including its on and kun readings, English meanings, examples of compounds using the character, and stroke order. There are no sound files. For some lessons, there is a separate page providing kanji reading exercises, which include compounds using some of the characters you just studied. The site's home page could be better organized -- scroll down toward the bottom of the page to find the link for the Main Index.
Kanji Flash Cards, Anyone?
You can electronically flip through kanji flash cards at Stechan's Kanji of the Day. Since June 1996, webmaster Steve Fylypchuk has added 20-25 kanji each month to these framed pages. There must be more than 500 characters listed now, a rather impressive collection. The kanji in the left frame are "easier"; those on the right, "harder." Clicking a kanji brings up a center frame showing the on and kun readings, English meaning, and the Nelson Reference Number, along with two or more character words (jukugo) with their readings and meanings. The pages don't do anything fancy -- no sounds, no animated characters, no tests. But it is fun to play with these full-screen flash cards. The characters are large and beautiful, and colors are used effectively to distinguish different parts of the center frame.
Conversation Lessons
The conversation lessons in Japanese Online, sponsored by Pacific Software Publishing, are based on common real-life situations, like discussing the weather, going to a restaurant, and so forth. There are eleven lessons, and each has about a dozen lines of dialog. The first five lessons use only romaji characters to spell Japanese words; lessons 6 through 11 use hiragana and katakana. At the end of each lesson, click "Listen to the Dialog" to hear it. You can also download the entire zipped WAV sound file, thus minimizing your online wait time. The hiragana dialogs are followed by their English translations, a vocabulary, a rather extensive grammar section, and a "Culture Point" section.
Japanese for Travelers
At Travlang's Foreign Languages for Travelers you can practice travel related phrases and sentences online in 47 languages. You must first select a language you speak (say, English), and then a language you want to learn (Japanese). That will take you to the Ryokosha no Tame no Nihongo (Japanese for Travelers) page. You are then asked to select one of seven categories: basic words, numbers, shopping/dining, travel, directions, places, or time and dates.
The basic words category, for instance, lists 42 phrases and sentences ranging from "Yes" to "Where is the bathroom?" Each of these is shown in English, kanji/kana (usually), and romaji. Unfortunately, only those in the basic words category have sound files in both English and Japanese. In the remaining six sections, you can only hear the English
phrases. (In most other languages, both the English phrases and their equivalent foreign language phrases have sound files.) That's unfortunate, because otherwise the pages are excellent. Nonetheless, this is a valuable site, since it covers many words and phrases that are useful when traveling.
Structured Learning: Japanese Courses at MIT
If you want formally structured Japanese lessons, visit the MIT Japanese Language Curriculum Materials, courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT makes available to the Internet community most of the materials it uses in the first four semesters of Japanese language study. The materials are contained in some 20 lessons, and include comprehension questions and answers. Many of the pages can be read in a "dictionary linked version": a glossary appears in a right-side frame, and clicking on a word in the text moves that word to top of the glossary frame. If you complete the four introductory and intermediate courses presented here, you will have mastered about 300 kanji, in addition to hiragana and katakana.
On the downside, these pages are strictly text-based, and include no animated GIFs or sound files. And for the beginner, using and understanding the site is no mean feat -- you don't get the spoon-fed treatment of Kids Web Japan. Nevertheless, the reading materials provided offer an enormous amount of useful information to online Japanese learners.
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