Kotoba! (Japanese dictionary) JReK - Japanese Sentence Search. Japanese Language and Usage - Stack Exchange. Kunyomi or Onyomi kanji reading. You can't really be 100% sure, but lately I do guess right of most of the time with characters I know well. When you look them up afterwards, it helps you remember them very easily if you guessed them right. If you think about looking up a difficult English word, it's not always easy to know how to pronounce it (which parts are stressed in particular) just by reading it, so it's not just Japanese that's tricky like that. I think teaching yourself kanji like that will create a lot of headaches later down the line. A lot of difficult characters contain radicals that are characters themselves. Look at 貝 and 斤, and then 質, for example. There are a couple of textbooks that structure a kanji-learning course around this concept.
It ignores how to read the characters completely, for reasons that we've explained already: the best way to learn to read... is to read. As for the confidence issue, I'd like to meet somebody who was confident about learning kanji. Examples of Japanese Onomatopoeia. From longtime reader K (who also contributed the awesome screenshots that made up the Goldmine of Engrish), I’ve received a huge list of Japanese Onomatopoeic words and their corresponding meanings.
Whether or not you’re into Japanese, it’s very interesting to see how sounds change between languages, and what two languages are further apart than English and Japanese? For example, frogs say “gero gero” instead of “ribbit”, and dogs bark “wan wan”. These words all come from indexes in the back of the English translation of an old manga (Japanese comic book) from the nineties, called “Fushigi Yuugi” (“Mysterious Play”). At K’s insistence, I’ve watched a couple episodes of the anime, and it’s pretty good Japanese practice because the characters seem to speak pretty rapidly, it feels really good hearing them rattle off a long sentence and understanding exactly what it means. Here are the words, arranged into alphabetical order!! Furigana-injector - Inserts furigana for kanji words (Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome extensions) 日本語資源 - Nihongoresources.com. The free online lessons Can't stress they're free enough.
These lessons are geared towards the serious learner, there is no cutting corners here. The online lessons teach you Japanese the way it's taught in universities, only for free. This has obvious advantages, as well as disadvantages, but the most important thing is that you can get your learn on. The site is still in its migratory phase, so not all of the lessons have been ported yet, I will get them online and up to date as soon as possible; for now only lessons 0 through 3 are back up. You need to know the kana if you want to take these lessons, if you don't then head over to lesson 0, which teaches you how to read/write the kana characters.
You're going to get as much out of these lessons as you put in, so I recommend not just sitting there and reading, write along with it and get that learn on! Japanese Text Initiative. Polarcloud.com. About Rikaichan is a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary tool for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.
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. Rikaichan 2.09 Rikaichan 2.08 Rikaichan 2.07 Installing in Thunderbird? Dictionary Files(install one or more) How to study Kanji. (Japanese for Morons Special Edition-73) A Select List of Japanese Language Study Sites. These also help read a web page.
You just have to copy and paste the text into the form. These are not aimed at JSL students, but if you understand Japanese fairly well, they are good. For Beginnerswww.JapanesePod101.com - Daily Perhaps a bit too much time-wasting laughing and joking around and non-study related chatting between presenters, but still very good. (See hints) If you can't easily locate the podcast feed on their website, just grab it here. NEW RSS - OLD RSS = - Some are video, so won't work on all MP3 players. Charles Kelly's Online Japanese Language Study Materials. Zkanji.
Student's Handbook - Japanese Language Learning Resources - Tangorin Online Japanese Dictionary.