It has been a while since I have had a chance to write on Japanese Words, but I hope that everyone’s studying is going well. Today I want to talk about something that I see as a big problem when it comes to learning Japanese. Something that has more to do with the learner and less to do with the materials. What I am talking about is not taking advantage of...

I have mentioned several times that studying Japanese should be fun. If it’s not fun then it is going to be much harder and take you longer to learn. An ideal method would be one that makes you feel like you aren’t studying at all. Over the last few weeks I have been playing with a Japanese learning tool called NihongoUP. And I say “playing”...

Yesterday, we covered what I consider to be an essential set of books for learning the Japanese kana and kanji. By themselves, Remembering the Kana and Remembering the Kanji are great tools for learning Japanese. So great in fact,  someone has created an entire website to help you use them more efficiently. Besides being a website, Reviewing the Kanji is an SRS...

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...

When it comes to learning Japanese there is a lot to memorize. You need to memorize words, phrases, and three alphabets (hiragana, katakana, and Kanji). Kanji alone has over 2000 characters. So finding the most efficient method to memorize Japanese should be high on our list. That’s where Anki comes in. But before we go into Anki, lets discuss one of the big...