I Think I’m Learning Japanese

by Nicholas Johnson, (22 February, 2006) in features > hi, tech

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.