There’s a heap of Japanese resources on the interweb. But which ones are worth your time?

To that end, we at Sushimatic thought it might be good to give you some pointers, directions in which to head for downloads, cool tools and other useful study sites.

General Study Sites

Daily Page - this is a good page to set as your homepage: it features kanji which change every day, and you can take a look at their meanings & some usage examples simply by mousing over them. There’s also a whole bunch of other stuff at the site, including flash games and a guide to Japanese signs.
The Japanese Page is a site that I keep coming back to - its got just as much material as the Daily Page but also offers other things - like a forum & a chat page in which to practice your 日本語, and a whole heap of articles on Japanese usage and cultural tidbits that even Japanese people find obscure. They also have some PDFs to download. E Language School has a Learn Japanese course. Its fairly basic on the whole, and probably best for beginners.

Kanji

The Kanji Site is a great place to get information on the JLPT Kanji, and even better, it has printable lists of the kanji for all levels.
The Kanji Blog is now discontinued, but it still remains in place on the web, meaning you can go and read some of their posts, or download the site for offline viewing.
Henshall Kanji Mnemonics is a list of the kanji taught in the first six years of school in Japan, and accompanying ways to remember them. Worth a look, although you’d have to use some other method to work out the readings, as they’re not given.
Here at Sushimatic, you can find some episodes of Kanji Daisuki, an old kids’ programme on NHK that aimed to teach children kanji. Its good fun, as long as you don’t mind watching puppets.
漢字　大好き#1
漢字　大好き#2
漢字　大好き#3
漢字　大好き#4
漢字　大好き#5
*I didn’t rip these off the TV, I found them knocking around the internet, so I can’t take the credit for them being here.*

Listening

There’s so many podcasts out there, and to be honest, I don’t like a lot of them. One I do like is Japanese Pod101. The host, Peter Galante, has a voice that’s not too hard on the ears, although it does drive me a bit batty when he tells his Japanese co-hosts that they had nice pronunciation. (Well, of course they do, it being their language an’ all.) A moot point though. If you’re new to Japanese or just want to review some older stuff, start from lesson one. A good way to download them would be by using Juice - its a podcast receiver that’s not so much of a drain on RAM as iTunes.

You can listen to some Japanese radio by checking out Radio Locator - when I last checked, there were 29 stations, although you couldn’t listen to them all online.

Tools

Computers won’t make you more productive, but they can help you on the road.

An excellent tool to help you remember vocabulary/kanji or even just your shopping list is Pauker. Essentially, you input the things you want to learn & the software works through them, training your brain to recall them as it goes. The timing is set in such a way so as to synchronise closely with the human memory, and I’m quite taken with the software - you can download some Pauker files made by JB’s fair hands here :
JPLT 4 Kanji
(right click & save)

An alternative was recently offered by Catty - Kanji Gold. I’ve just been trying it out, and its pretty easy to get the hang off. Downloads and installs nice and easy too.

But by far my favourite has to be Wakan - it has absolutely everything you need all under one bonnet. You can test yourself and then print out learning lists, its a dictionary with the option of adding different functionalities, it even looks up kanji. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

If you can’t be bothered installing new software, or you don’t have your own computer, then why not try out Flashcard exchange - they have a massive selection of Japanese flashcards available for online study, download & printing right here.

I mentioned above that downloading websites and viewing them offline is a good option - you could view them on a PDA (or even your GP2X - that’s what I do…). The best software for this is HTTrack Website Copier.

If you want to view Japanese sites, but find yourself at a loss because you can’t understand most of them, then there’s a fantastic plugin for Firefox. Rikaichan installs a dictionary into Firefox, and translates kanji with a mouseover on most websites. I’ve been able to read the news on The Daily Yomiuri this week.

Well, that’s your lot. Any suggestions? Email us.

More links to more general Japanese related things can be found by going here.