smart.fm - Excellent site to learn Japanese

Among the many internet links to good sites about Japanese, Smart.fm is probably the best. This is a site on which you can grow your knowledge of Japanese at your own pace by using the iKnow quiz application (runs in your internet browser).
iKnow is very well made: it remembers which questions you had trouble with and which were easy, and it revisits all questions anyway to make sure that you remember them.
More importantly, it lets you practice different aspects of the language at the same time:

Vocabulary

Every item you learn is about one word.

Kanji

If you set up iKnow to show you kanji, you learn the kanji at the same time.

Grammar

Each word comes with an example sentence, so you learn or rehearse some grammar at the same time, too.

iKnow keeps track of how often you visit, how much you study each time and so on, so it adapts itself to your training schedule.
Their Japanese Core 2000 course, in 10 packages (package 1 is here) gradually builds up your knowledge so that in the end, you know 2000 words. This can take a long time; I'm still doing Step 1 at the moment.
If you have any problems working with this site or the quiz application, let me know. It is brilliant and, best of all, free! Do note that the Web site is sometimes not available.

Me, me, me

Vlogger 'Systemjap' explains all the ways in which you can say 'I' or 'me' in Japanese, and when you would use which one.

Japanese from real life

Well, enough talking about Japanese, let's get to some actual Japanese.
This is a picture of a Chinese (or in this case Japanese) lantern, hanging outside Kushi-Tei of Tokyo, a Japanese restaurant close to the Hotel Okura in Amsterdam.
Can you make out what it says? Click on the image for a larger view.

How to choose a book using Google Books

It is neither plausible nor practical to actually buy every book on any given subject. If you have a good local library, then you may be able to browse and skim several books before you find one you like and borrow it. If you're not so lucky, you may have to make up your mind in a few minutes in you local book store.

I personally find such commitment too much too soon. Why not flirt with several before investing? Google Books is just perfect for that. All you need to type is the subject you are after, and you get a long list of books. Alternatively, you can browse using the subject index. All you have to do is to click on the book of your choice from the list.

One great advantage is that you see the year of publication almost instantly. When it comes to language learning materials , it is usually the newer the better. If it is not so, you'll be able to compare different editions and see which one actually suits your needs better. For example, our study book Japanese for Busy People is available on limited preview in almost all editions.

Another major advantage is that you can save the images to your computer, make a print out of a page or two...or fifty. Sometimes there is such gem of a page in an otherwise useless book. Some books are listed in their entirety, and some are partially available. I've come across limited preview books, which miss five pages, only. "Limited preview" or "Full view" are options you can pick from the drop down menu just under the search bar.

I have recently been using Google Books to choose a Kanji book that I finally may want to own. I have already used many pages from various books to practise Katagana and Hiragana. I was also able to read about some difficult grammar points from various sources, which has immensely helped.

It is not so different from Amazon's "look inside" feature, but I've found it to be more convenient and accessible.

Doumo arigatou Mathijs

Learning kanji: only 2500 to go!

Here is some general information about kanji that is useful if you want to learn to use them.

This might take a while

A high school graduate in Japan knows some 2000 kanji, known as the 'jouyou kanji'. They start learning 80 in the first year of primary school, and the tempo increases over time. This Wikipedia entry lists the primary-school kanji (about 1000), organized by grade.

No kanji is an island

You might wonder why 田, which mean "rice paddy", shows up so much in Japanese texts. Do people really have such a need to talk about rice paddies? They don't, but in combination with other kanji, it means all kinds of related things, such as 'farm', 'peasant', etc. More importantly, it also features heavily in names of places and people.
The point here is that learning individual kanji is just the beginning. It's as least as important to learn kanji phrases. Jisho.org, the online dictionary, has links to kanji phrases for each kanji.

Break it down

All but the most basic kanji consist of various identifiable parts which may or may not have meanings on their own. If they do, that's great, because there's a good chance that the meaning of the part will help you remember the meaning of the whole thing.
For example, knowing that 言 (used in 'iimasu') means 'to say' makes it easier to remember that 話 (used in 'hanashimasu') means 'tale' or 'talk', 記 means 'account' or 'narrative', and 語 (the '-go' in 'eigo', 'doitsugo' etc) means 'language'. And the 言 kanji itself has the shape of 口 in it, which means 'mouth'.
It also means that you can get a (very) vague idea of the meaning of an unknown kanji by examining its parts.

Don't try to read what you see (yet)

Almost every kanji in Japanese has at least 2 readings, which are normally completely different from each other. For example, 日 ('sun' or 'day') can be pronounced 'hi' or 'nichi', depending on context. And, of course, 'hi' can turn into 'bi' in certain sound contexts, such as in 金曜日, 'kinyoubi'.
All of this means that it's really hard to read Japanese out loud, and much easier to try to figure out the meaning by just looking.
The best approach is not to think of kanij as representing sounds: very often, they are pronounced as a single syllable or even letter (e.g.　the 言 in 言います is pronounced 'i').

First things first

With at least 2000 kanji to learn, it's good to know where to start. The best approach is to learn the most often used kanji first. Jisho.org indicates a frequency in newspapers for every kanji, but won't give you a list by frequency. This remains a challenge.

The joy of mnemonics

Learning kanji is hard because there are so many of them, and they very quickly become very complicated to look at. To help you learn, use mnemonics: relationships between a kanji and its meaning(s) which you construct.
Here's an example: the kanji 首 means 'neck'. When I first saw it, I thought it looked like a cartoon face: two eyes at the top, a nose in the middle, and a huge grin at the bottom. 'Face' and 'neck' link together quite easily in my mind, so I remember this kanji with fairly little effort.
Here's the important thing: whether 首 is meant to look like a face or not is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is what I thought when I first saw it and saw its meaning, because that's the most likely thing I'll think when I see it again.
In this case, 'face' and 'neck' are somewhat related, but often, my association and the actual meaning can be miles apart. The trick is to bring them together in your mind, even if that seems like nonsense. E.g. if the kanji reminds you of a banana and it means shop, imagine a shop that sells only bananas.
Cognitive psychology has determined that this kind of memorizing is the best way to remember things. I'm applying it to learning kanji, and I think I'm doing OK.

Yahoo! Kids Japan News

http://news.kids.yahoo.co.jp/headline/

Our teacher told us to check out kids' news channels to pick up some easy Japanese. This link points to the Yahoo! Japan Kids News Headlines, which contains daily links to news stories for kids.
The benefits of reading these stories are:
-Language is for kids, so the choice of words is simple.
-It is less likely to contain information that presupposes a lot of background knowledge of Japan (e.g. political parties, cultural icons and so on)
-The text uses less kanji than normally, and simpler ones.
I'm going to try and translate a story, will let you know how I'm doing.

Welcome to Sushi Ham Kaas

This weblog is a place for three students of Japanese to exchange information found online or elsewhere to help us learn the Japanese language.
We have about 100 hours of education, we know hiragana and katakana and are about to finish the book "Japanese for Busy People - Vol. I". We are continuing with book II in the autumn of 2009.

To start us off, here's a good tip from Koichi, a blogger who has lots of useful information about Japan and Japanese on the site www.tofugu.com: if you see a kanji or Japanese phrase that you don't know the meaning of, copy-paste it into Google and do an image search.

For example, you might not know what 家鴨 means. But just paste it into Google, click Images at the top, and what do you see? That's right.