When I first moved to Japan about two-and-a-half years ago, the only Japanese I knew came from Styx songs. I’ve come a long way since then. Now I know Japanese from Styx songs and commercials for Japanese car insurance.

Okay, I admit it, my Japanese is far from great; I’m barely able to hold a conversation with a five-year-old on my best days. Still, I’ve come across dozens of computer applications and websites that are useful for students of Japanese, and a few of them have even been good enough to fall into the category of “helpful to my linguistically challenged self.” Combine some of these programs and sites with a good study routine and you’ll be pera-pera in no time. (Or omit the good study routine–like me–and you’ll at least be able to avoid ordering raw beef from a menu. I think I understand why my Japanese is so bad…)

Installing Japanese fonts and IMEs

Before your computer can help teach you Japanese, you have to teach your computer Japanese. If you are running a common installation of a common Western operating system on a typical Western computer, chances are you’ll need to do two things to get your system to read and write Japanese: install the correct fonts and install an input method editor. Neither of these tasks is as complicated as it sounds.

In order for your computer to display katakana/hiragana/kanji, you need to have at least one Japanese font installed. Luckily for you, you probably already have these fonts on your computer and all you need to do is enable their use. How you do that is a little different for every operating system, but here are some guides that may be helpful (you can find more information by searching for “japanese language support your-operating-system” in your search engine of choice).

• Adding Language Support in Windows XP
• Mac OS X Language Support Downloads
• Installing Japanese Language Support in Linux

Once you have the proper fonts installed and can read Japanese on your computer, you’ll need to install an input method editor, or IME, to be able to write in Japanese. An IME is a little application that allows you and your Western keyboard to be able to type the Japanese “alphabet.” The guides above all go on to explain how to get an IME up and running in your operating system of choice and how to use that IME once you install it.

Dictionaries and translators

You can put your computer’s new Japanese ability to good use right away with online dictionaries. Online Japanese dictionaries provide a way to quickly look up a word or phrase if you’re near a computer; just point your browser to the dictionary site, type in the word (some dictionaries even allow you to input the word as hiragana, katakana or kanji) and see the results. Some dictionaries are more thorough than others; here’s a list of some of the better ones out there (not coincidently culled from the SagaJET links page).

Jim Breen’s Japanese Dictionary

Search for both English and Japanese words in a variety of dictionaries. Probably the most customizable and complete dictionary online.

Nihongo: Japanese Language

trussel.com’s Japanese language page with a plethora of information, including a dictionary.

Kantango Japanese Dictionary

Creating an account lets you create your own wordlists, share them, mark words for review, make quizzes and more.

If you want to decipher more than a word or a phrase, try an online translator instead. Online translators come in two varaties; one flavor has you paste text into an input box to see the translation and the other lets you input a URL and returns a translation of the corresponding web page. Here are some good online translators (many of which can handle any number of languages, although usually with limited success).

Google Language Tools

Use Google to translate chunks of text or entire web pages.

Translation Aid

A page which helps you translate Japanese text from a WWW page.

Babel Fish

Free service from Altavista that provides a (sometimes very rough) translation among many languages.

If you would rather just click a button and have a Japanese website translated for you, try the Google translate bookmarklet. Just copy this bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks/favorites folder and run it when on a Japanese web page: poof, instant translation.

Study aides

For those who actually want to learn Japanese rather than just be able to translate it online, about a million websites have you covered. Searching for “learn Japanese,” in fact, gives me “about 154,000″ sites from which to choose. Take your pick. My favorite of the bunch is Dartmoth University’s Kanji Practice, which helps you learn kanji by showing you video clips of how each character is written.

Before there were “about 154,000″ websites to help you learn Japanese, there were, of course, flashcards. But who wants to make flahscards with pen and paper when you can do it so much more hi-tech? The free Yahoo! Widget Engine lets you run little applications, called “widgets,” on your computer desktop. There are a couple of flashcard widgets you can use, along with your IME, to review any Japanese you can type.

Japanese can be fun. Really.

Studying Japanese, even with things called “widgets,” can get boring. What better way to take a break than with a video game. Play a Japanese video game, though, and you can take a break and learn at the same time. Many games are written in pretty basic Japanese, and those made for younger audiences often have helpful furigana accompanying more advanced kanji. You can pick up used games and game consoles for cheap at your local game/comic book store.

There is even a PC game made specifically for students of Japanese. Slime Forest is a computer role playing game that claims to “teach you katakana, hiragana, and over a thousand kanji.” It’s also free, like all of the resources in this article. And anything that’s free, hi-tech and can help you survive in Japan is worth a look.

As a “computer guy” (and borderline obsessive, I think), I’m pretty particular about my computer. I like to have my desktop organized just so, I like to use Firefox for browsing the web and Thunderbird for checking email, I like to keep my documents folder squeaky clean. It’s pretty hard for me, then, to use a foreign computer for any significant amount of time.

For many JETs, though, using a computer other than their own for much of the day is a necessity. Whether they don’t own a computer, don’t want to lug their laptop around or can’t lug their desktop around, a lot of JETs are stuck using an office computer at work. I’ve heard some stories about these office computers that make me wonder how Japan got such a tech-savvy image; 10-year-old PCs with Japanese-only menus and restrictions on internet use can make it awfully hard for a JET to get work (or “work”) done.

Luckily, there are some solutions to office computing woes. Here are some fixes to the most common complaints I’ve heard about using clunky office computers.

My grandma’s computer is better than this

The biggest problem with using office computers seems to be the conditions of those computers. Many schools and offices don’t have the budget to replace old computers or the staff to maintain newer ones. Short of buying a new computer yourself, there’s not much you can do to significantly improve such a situation, but there are a couple of little tips to prevent the computer you are using from crashing for the 18th time in a row.

• Limit how many programs you have open at once. Having fewer applications running means having more free system resources, which translates to a speedier-feeling computer.
• Use “lighter” applications when you can. Modern office programs (like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice) are generally huge memory hogs that can put a real strain on older computers; avoid them if possible. You can write a simple memo or lesson plan in a basic text editor (like Notepad or Wordpad on Windows machines) just as well as you can in a bloated word processor.
• Restart. Computers running on Windows are notorious for getting slower the longer they are left on. If a computer is running exceptionally slowly, try restarting it; doing so will free up any misused system resources and hopefully speed things up. Also, in my experience, restarting gets rid of at least 80 percent of errors you may come across.

What do you mean SagaJET is blocked?

Many offices have filters in place that restrict workers’ internet use. These filters are there to stop users from idling their days away looking at things like message boards and porn. Sometimes, though, the filters are too restrictive and block perfectly respectable sites that JETs have legitimate reasons for visiting. Or sometimes you just need to waste a few minutes on the SagaJET message board. (That’s not really blocked anywhere, is it? Because there hasn’t been porn on there for ages, I swear.)

You can get around many filtering systems with a simple trick involving that most respectable of websites, Google. Google has a feature that you can use to translate websites to and from many languages. The trick is, when you use this feature, you don’t actually point your web browser to the website you are translating, but rather to Google, so you won’t be blocked by many office filters (as long as Google isn’t blocked). To use this trick (found via Lifehacker), just copy and paste this URL into your browser:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=

Enter the URL of the page you are trying to get to after the “u=” (like “u=www.sagajet.com“) and you should be able to get to a previously “forbidden” page. If the page you are trying to view isn’t written in English, just change “en|en” to the desired language (like “fr|fr” for French).

Note that this trick won’t work on sites like Hotmail or Gmail that require a secure login; to get to pages like those from a restricted office computer would require the use of a proxy server, which is a little beyond the scope of this article. Also note that you use this method at your own risk; if you get in trouble for bypassing office filters, we never met.

Give office computers the thumb

If you want to totally personalize your office computing experience, buy yourself a thumb drive (also called a USB drive or flash drive or pen drive or little miracle worker). Thumb drives are like small, portable hard drives that you can plug into a USB port on any computer. The obvious advantage of a thumb drive is that it gives you a convenient place to store all of your files (and since you can buy drives with gigabytes of free memory, you can store a lot of files).

Recently, though, some very smart computer folks have figured out a way to run applications from a thumb drive, too. If you use open-source programs like Firefox, OpenOffice or Gaim at home but are left stranded when using an office computer, now you can put portable versions of these applications on your thumb drive and use them anywhere. These portable versions run totally off of a thumb drive, so you don’t have to install a thing on the office computer. Best of all, these programs also don’t leave any traces of your activity on the computer you use them on, so your coworkers won’t find that email you wrote about how inept they all are.

For the truly adventurous/truly nerdy, you can also run a version of Linux, Damn Small Linux, from a thumb drive.

Attaka Matsuri is a festival that showcases the local art and dance of Ureshino, with various events around the town. Amongst these, you’ll be able to taste local dishes, view exhibitions at various sites and sample the unique Onsen at discounted prices. Definitely a good way to warm you up during this cold season! More info on the message board.

If there’s one computer-related question I’m asked more often than any other by JETs, it’s definitely, “Can you help me buy a computer?” Asking me for help computer shopping is like asking a junkie to please help pick out the best heroin, so I’m always happy to offer my advice. However, since my advice is usually the same, I’ll share it here for anyone who is in the computer-buying market to consider: buy the computer you need.

I doubt I could offer a more general piece of advice if I tried, so let me go into more detail. There are currently about 1.6 million different computer models you can buy. Before you buy any of them, you need to figure out what you’re going to use your new computer for. Once you have your needs figured out, you can jot down a few features your computer must have and then go looking for a good value. The problem for many JETs, though, is matching up what they want to do with their computer to megabytes of RAM, gigahertz of processing power and all the other numbers you need to know when computer shopping.

What to look for

JETs I’ve helped all wanted their new computers to perform well in three areas: office tasks (making worksheets, planning lessons), internet tasks (writing e-mail, browsing the web) and entertainment “tasks” (keeping a digital photo or music library, watching movies). Some folks wanted more, like the ability to use their computer to make cheap telephone calls (that’s “VoIP” for those acronym fans out there), but all listed those three areas as essential. With those needs in mind, then, here’s my humble advice on what kinds of features to look for in a new computer.

• Desktop/notebook. Before you can even start thinking about features for your new computer, you need to decide what kind of computer you want, a desktop or a notebook. You can get more power for less money with a desktop, but a laptop will give you the luxury of portability. Unless you plan to do a lot of gaming or other, similarly demanding computing tasks, I’d recommend a laptop; you’ll appreciate its mobility both here in Japan and when you’re leaving/desperately trying to pack years of your life in two suitcases.
• Operating system. Macintosh or Windows is a question that can inspire the most intense nerd rage you’ve ever seen. Both major operating systems have their supporters, and rightly so. As much as die hard Mac or Windows users may hate to hear it, either operating system is fine for your basic computing needs. Go with what you’re most comfortable with. If you’ve used Windows for years, go Windows. If you spell “Microsoft” as “Micro$oft,” go Mac. If you self-identify as a rebel, you can always try Linux or another free operating system.
• Size. Assuming you opt for a notebook (as most JETs I know do), get a size that fits with how you plan to use your new computer. If you want to take your notebook to and from work every day, you’d do well to consider smaller, lighter computers that may short you on processing power but will save you back strain.
• Screen. Having a 17-inch cinema display may look sexy, but I’d actually put screen size pretty low on the list of priorities for the average JET. Unless you plan on watching a lot of movies or doing a lot of graphic design on your computer, you’ll probably find a 13-inch screen suits you just as well as the bigger options (smaller screens also equal lighter computers; handy if your system travels with you a lot). Instead, look for a bright screen with good contrast.
• Processor. Like screen size, processing power also shouldn’t be of much concern to the average JET. Making worksheets and browsing the internet won’t even come close to taxing today’s processors. Case in point: I work on a five-year-old notebook with an 800 megahertz processor all day long with hardly a complaint (and modern processors run, on average, twice as fast as the one in my computer). If you’re not planning on compiling any code or playing any 3D games, you can save money by opting for a slower processor (1.2 gigahertz will be more than enough for most).
• RAM. RAM, on the other hand, is not something you want to skimp on. Computers use RAM (random access memory) as a very convenient place to store files and applications you’re currently using, so the more RAM you have, the snappier your computer will seem. You’ll need a system with at least 256 megabytes of RAM, but opting for more (like 512 megabytes or 1 gigabyte) is the easiest way to increase your computer’s performance. If you want a lot of RAM but still want to save money, note that it’s almost always a better value to buy more RAM from a good dealer and install it yourself after you get your computer (it’s pretty easy) than to choose the factory upgrade option.
• Hard drive. Hard drives hold pretty much every piece of information on your computer, so getting a bigger hard drive means being able to store more pirated legally purchased music and movies. A 40 gigabyte hard drive will be adequate for keeping documents and modest music, movie and photo libraries on your computer; upgrade if you are an iTunes addict or can’t put down your digital camera.
• Disc drives. Basically any computer you’d think of buying will come with a CD/DVD drive already installed. Many modern computers, though, don’t ship with floppy drives, so make sure you’re getting one if you’ve been carrying your life around on disks until now. Also, upgrading to either a writable CD or DVD drive is highly recommended; how else will you make everyone a “Best of SMAP” mixed CD?
• Ports. No computer is an island. Ports let you connect your computer to the outside world. Make sure your computer comes with an ethernet port (for connecting to your work network and high speed internet), a couple of USB ports (for hooking up your printer/music player/camera) and a modem (if you still use dial-up internet service). Although it’s not technically a port, I’d also recommend getting a system with a wireless network card; wireless is the wave of the future, I hear.
• Accessories. You could easily spend a good chunk of a JET salary adding every available accessory to your new computer. Try to resist. If you think you’ll use an extra feature on a regular basis and it doesn’t break the bank, add away. For instance, if you plan on using your computer as a telephone (remember VoIP?), you might want to invest in a good headset.

Just tell me what to buy already

If you’ve read all of the above advice and are still confused about what kind of computer to get, I’m afraid I can’t be of much more help here. Computers aren’t like baseball caps; one size does not fit all. The best tip I can give you is to think about what daily tasks you would do with a new computer, then shop around for a system that will let you get those tasks done easily.

Or you can always ask me to go computer shopping with you; I don’t plan on kicking my tech habit any time soon.

I’m not a JET. Even though I may help out my wife–who is a JET–with the occasional eikaiwa, I’ve never been in a Japanese school as a teacher. I’ve never come up with a lesson plan about the progressive tense, never made a worksheet on gerunds, never recited vocabulary words for a classroom full of students. These are perhaps not the best qualifications for someone getting ready to offer advice to JETs.

I am, however, a big fan of technology. I’m a web designer and work on a computer most of the day, so I know a little something about technology, too. Even though I’ve never signed a JET contract, I can Google “JET contract” in two seconds flat.

As I’ve watched my wife and my other JET friends work as assistant language teachers for the past two years, I’ve realized a “computer guy” like myself (read: nerd) might have something to offer the JET community. I’ve often been able to give advice when these ALTs talk about scouring through dozens of websites to find good teaching resources, struggling with making a worksheet with pencil and paper or fretting about what kind of computer to get. No reason, then, for me not to offer this same advice–tips on how technology can help you do your job–here on SagaJET.

There are a lot of reasons you might not want to take my advice, though. Like I said, I’m a web designer, not a JET. My perception of how technology can make JET life easier is just that: my perception. Much of what I think will be helpful advice might be either something you already know or something you don’t care to know. Also, since there is a big variation in how tech saavy JETs are, a lot of what I write could be pretty elementary for those of you running your favorite Linux distro (things should be just about right for those of you who don’t know what a “Linux distro” is, though). So, take my advice with whatever sized grain of salt you think appropriate. If I can help even a few JETs, then mission accomplished. If not, I still get to write about technology, which is like letting that creepy math teacher at your school tell you all there is to know about snack bars.

Keeping those caveats in mind, let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome to the first installment of “Hi, Tech.”

First installment, you say?

That’s right, my ambitions are so grand (and my free time so sadly, sadly unfilled) that I’m going to declare this a weekly series before I’m even done with the first episode. Kind of like George Lucas and Star Wars, only without lightsabers.

Also unlike Mr. Lucas, I don’t have the whole plot for this series mapped out yet. I know I’m going to post a new article every Wednesday. I also know that, while I have a few good ideas for future articles, I’m eager to hear what you want to learn about in future installments and what you think about the current ones. To that end, comments will always be open on all of these articles so you can leave your thoughts in electronic form (you have to be registered to post comments, but that’s a one-minute process, or it’s already done if you’re registered on the SagaJET message board). Or, if you’re the e-mailing type, you can reach me at webmaster@sagajet.com.

Where to from here?

You’re going to need two tools to get the most out of upcoming installments. First, you’ll need a computer, any computer. It doesn’t even have to be your computer, although next week I’ll be covering what to look for in buying yourself a computer if you do want it to be your computer. Second, you’ll need a web browser and access to the internet (helpful for reading this website, I hear). Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have a willingness to give feedback or contribute to a discussion on the topics covered, since multiple viewpoints will almost certainly be better than just mine. That’s it. Odds are you already have these things, so you should be all set.

I thought there was going to be advice?

Remember back in the first paragraph I said I was going to offer advice to JETs? And remember how I haven’t actually offered any advice yet? I should fix that before the end of the first installment. So, here it is, quicky advice to hold you over until next week. If you haven’t already, check out SagaJET’s links page, which has a huge list of websites you may find useful (including some really nice sites about teaching English).

Once you check that out, leave a comment or send an email if you want to see a specific topic covered in the future.