Over the last month I have been pretty busy with a number of things including the holiday season, working as a volunteer diver to remove おにひとで (devil starfish) to protect the coral, and just work in general that have kept me away from my Japanese study. It has also caused me to write less on Japanese Words. Though I hate to admit it, I have barely...

I have mention before that learning the the most common Japanese words first is an essential part of learning to speak Japanese quickly. You want to learn the words that you will use, not just the ones that are ordered in a book. However, wouldn’t it also be great if there was a simple way to learn the words that didn’t require just pure repetition. A...

The most popular post on JapaneseWords.net has been 1000+ Japanese Words List. As the title suggests, the post contains a list of over 1000 common Japanese Words and Kanji. I am proud to announce that the list has just gotten much better. Thanks to the hard work of Michele Romanini and his wife Bika Fujioka, the list is now available for download for Anki...

The last two tools I have written about (Remembering the Kanji and Reviewing the Kanji) have all been about learning the kanji. When learning kanji it’s important to not lose focus of why we are studying in the first place, “to read Japanese”. And it just so happens, that this next tool is a cool website called Read the Kanji. Read The Kanji gives...

In the last couple of days we have covered Anki, an easy to use flash card program that will help you learn Japanese words and kanji quicker. We also discussed Denshi Jisho, a great Japanese dictionary. Today we will discuss two tools for reading and learning Japanese online (let’s face it, we spend a lot of time on here). Firefox is a browser and RIkaichan is...

Yesterday I discussed Anki, a really great flash card program that will help you learn faster. Today we will talk about another very important companion to learning Japanese, a dictionary! This dictionary has more than just the ability to look up words, it can give you examples in sentences and help you find kanji as well. I have used a lot of dictionaries in my...