

Despite being intended for learners of Japanese, videos of busty YouTube inhabitant “Hannah Minx” have lately been proving popular amongst the Japanese themselves, though for reasons unrelated to any conventional form of education…
Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favourite manga, and in fact the first I ever read in the original Japanese, is よつばと!/Yotsuba&!, by 東清彦/Kiyohiko Azuma. It is an entertaining and easygoing manga, with good art and story, so that alone is enough to recommend it; it is a best seller in Japan so many would agree. However, I think it also happens to be the ideal beginner’s manga for learning Japanese, for several compelling reasons.
Read the rest of this entry »

Having explained a little about how great Rikaichan is, I’d like to introduce an excellent tool for many of the instances where Rikaichan is unusable: StarDict. This open source and cross platform dictionary software functions similarly to Rikaichan, but is not bound to a browser, being stand alone software.
Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few dictionary tools no student of Japanese should be without. The first amongst these is the by now quite well known Rikaichan, a dictionary extension for Firefox which, when activated, displays an inflection sensitive dictionary entry popup on mouseover of Japanese text. The original site based Rikai is now basically defunct, but deserves credit for implementing the idea.
Read the rest of this entry »