{"id":34658,"date":"2014-04-16T17:49:24","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T21:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=34658"},"modified":"2014-04-16T17:49:24","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T21:49:24","slug":"%e3%80%90rocketnews24%e3%80%91six-and-a-half-essential-resources-for-learning-japanese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2014\/04\/16\/%e3%80%90rocketnews24%e3%80%91six-and-a-half-essential-resources-for-learning-japanese\/","title":{"rendered":"\u3010RocketNews24\u3011Six (and a half) essential resources for learning Japanese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by\u00a0Michelle Lynn Dinh<\/a>\u00a0(Shimane<\/a>-ken,\u00a0Chibu-mura,\u00a0<\/strong>2010\u201313),<\/strong>\u00a0editor and writer for\u00a0RocketNews24<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>The following article was written by\u00a0Philip Kendall<\/a>\u00a0(Fukushima-ken,\u00a0Shirakawa-shi,\u00a02006\u201311), senior editor and writer for\u00a0RocketNews24<\/a>,\u00a0a Japan-based site dedicated to bringing fun and quirky news from Asia to English speaking audiences.<\/p>\n

\"Six<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve\u00a0said before<\/a>, Japanese isn\u2019t actually as hard to learn as it\u2019s often made out to be. Unlike English, for example, Japanese follows its own grammatical rules far more rigidly, pronunciation is easy because there is only one variant of each\u00a0vowel sound to choose from (none of this\u00a0tomayto<\/em>\/tomahto<\/em>\u00a0business), and it\u2019s possible to create entire, perfectly meaningful and valid\u00a0sentences without uttering a single pronoun or bothering to conjugate a verb.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the language will not magically seep into you through a desire to speak it alone \u2014 you still need to encounter and study it as often as possible.\u00a0With that in mind, we\u2019d like to present to you the\u00a0six and a half resources that no dedicated student of the Japanese language should ever be without<\/strong>. Oh, and the good news is some of them are completely free.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. \u201cImiwa?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Six<\/p>\n

Your dictionary is the tool you\u2019ll use most often while learning any foreign language, so you need to pick a good one. As much as we love paperbacks and hard copies of books, short of finding a six-inch-thick Japanese\/English dictionary that also comes with a team of thumb-sized elves who flick to the right entry on command and then keep a record of it for easy access, paper dictionaries just aren\u2019t going to cut it any more. But why spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated electronic dictionary when you can get one that lives inside your smartphone, is constantly updating itself to become more useful, and costs absolutely nothing?<\/p>\n

Formerly known as Kotoba!,\u00a0iOS application Imiwa?<\/strong>\u00a0is arguably one of the best dictionaries out there. Available for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, Imiwa? is completely ad-free and, as well as being created and maintained by a genuinely dedicated and experienced team, has won legions of fans across the globe \u2014 and for good reason. At time of writing, the app is up to version 4.0 and includes pretty much everything you could ever need from a dictionary, including\u00a0word lookups, kanji searches (searchable by radical, stroke order or words in which they appear), synthesised speech, verb conjugation, customisable lists, an enormous number\u00a0of example sentences with words shown in context, and more. It\u2019s also multilingual, supporting English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Russian.<\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re a dedicated Android user or recently made the switch to Google\u2019s OS, there must be an old iPhone lying around your or a friend\u2019s house, so do yourself a favour, grab it and install Imiwa? today. (But if you\u2019re determined not to be seen in public with an iOS device then\u00a0JED<\/a>, while not quite as expansive or aesthetically pleasing as Imiwa?, is a solid Japanese\/English dictionary app for Android, and also completely free.)<\/p>\n

Check it out on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Facebook<\/a>\u00a0now. You won\u2019t regret it.<\/p>\n

2. Rikaichan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Six<\/p>\n

As far as Japanese learners are concerned,\u00a0Rikaichan<\/a>\u00a0is easily the \u201cbest plug-in ever\u201d. With a single\u00a0click, Firefox users activate a plug-in that allows them to\u00a0browse Japanese websites with instant, no-fuss\u00a0access to an extensive Japanese\/English dictionary. Just hover your cursor over the word you\u2019re struggling to understand and the plug-in will throw up not just a reading, but its meaning, and in some cases even break multiple-kanji words down for you so you can see what the individual characters mean.<\/p>\n

Rikaichan is a reliable, easy-to-use, and completely free tool that makes navigating Japanese content online far less painful, and once you discover it you\u2019ll never want to let it go. Oh, and Chrome users need not despair either \u2013 Rikaikun, a solid port of the Rikaichan application, is available for Google\u2019s browser over at the\u00a0Chrome web store<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the rest of the list.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted by\u00a0Michelle Lynn Dinh\u00a0(Shimane-ken,\u00a0Chibu-mura,\u00a02010\u201313),\u00a0editor and writer for\u00a0RocketNews24.\u00a0The following article was written by\u00a0Philip Kendall\u00a0(Fukushima-ken,\u00a0Shirakawa-shi,\u00a02006\u201311), senior editor and writer for\u00a0RocketNews24,\u00a0a Japan-based site dedicated to bringing fun and quirky news from Asia to English speaking audiences. As we\u2019ve\u00a0said before, Japanese isn\u2019t actually as hard to learn as it\u2019s often made out to be. Unlike English, for example, Japanese […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[1252,546,1255,1253,1116,349,1254],"class_list":["post-34658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articlejournalism","category-writers","tag-japanese-study","tag-language","tag-learning","tag-resources","tag-rocketnews24","tag-study","tag-tools"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-910","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34658"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34663,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34658\/revisions\/34663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}