Since the current release of Chrome doesn’t handle plugins you will need to install the beta. It will ask you to do this if you try and install the plugin.  Give it a try and let me know what you think. I’ve got it downloaded and it seems to work just fine. In fact it was easier than Rikaichan because all I needed to do was one click.

Rikaikun Plugin

So you finally figured out how to read and write Japanese on your computer (if you haven’t, do this right away). The problem is that the standard fonts for Japanese aren’t very good. In addition to just being plane bad looking or difficult to read, there may occasionally be characters that don’t show up. Since you will see Japanese words written in all different kinds of fonts and handwriting, it is also a good idea to get used to lots of different ones. But don’t worry. This post is all about choosing a new font.

Michele Romanini (the same person who turned the 1000+ common Japanese words into an SRS list) has found a great list of fonts that can be downloaded. Since there are quite a few different kinds of fonts, you should be able to find something to your liking.

Installing fonts will vary depending on the OS you are using, but there is a a lot of documentation on the web. Simple type “installing fonts in (name of your OS)”.

You can find the Japanese Fonts at the link below

Japanese Fonts

Since the weekend is almost here, there is plenty of time to sit in front of the computer watching YouTube videos. Why not turn this little activity into Japanese learning time as well. Setting up your YouTube page to easily find Japanese videos and even read Japanese is very simple and can easily be changed back at any time.

1. Open up YouTube

2. In the upper left hand corner you should see a language and a region setting.  The left is the region (where you want to see videos from) and the right is the language you want to view the page in.

3. To view videos from Japan, simply click on the left link (it probably reads “wordwide” or has your specific region) and change it to Japanese. If you want to get a little more Japanese practice, then you can also switch the page language to Japanese as well.

4. Don’t forget to use Firefox and to turn on Rikaichan to make reading the page easy!

We spend a lot of time in front of our computers. So the better it is set up for Japanese, the more likely we will be to actually view Japanese. Over the next few posts I will be showing you how to setup your browser to make it easy  to view and read Japanese pages like a pro even if you just starting to learn. The starting point is the Internet browser itself.

Firefox is a great browser for learning Japanese because of it’s ability to add additional abilities by adding on different modules. After just a few clicks you will have the ability to read Japanese and Kanji even if you don’t know how yet. Firefox has also been around for some time and is very stable.

If you aren’t already using Firefox, then you will need to download and  install it on your computer. It’s a completely free program and you can download it here: Firefox.

So go ahead and get it installed. The next post will be covering how to add features that will allow you to easy read Japanese pages.

If you haven’t done so already, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss the next few posts: RSS FEED