More Japanese Websites
You know, one of the things we take for granted is knowing what websites to visit. When you’re trying to immerse yourself in a language, you may not know where to go on the internets for good stuff to read. Well, here I am to save the day again, with more website recommendations.
- A friend of a friend (actually, he’s totally just plain “friend” now, and he says I’m his favorite
) runs this blog that’s tangentially related to his graphic design business. Mostly it’s just about cool-looking stuff he sees and people he meets in daily life. It’s got lots of photos, which helps as a learner because it boths keeps your attention and clues you in to what’s being discussed. - Goo appear to have launched a new lyrics search service. Mercifully, it’s text-based. None of that Flash nonsense that people have been trying to force on us for a while. Effen Flash, riding roughshod on my lyric-reading attempts.
- Watching Japanese dubs of movies and TV shows you’ve previously seen in another language, or any audiovisual materials that are from a culture with which you are already deeply familiar, is a great learning tool. And so is reading about them. At Goo, you can read film synopses, like this one of The Rock (1996) — “You want me to stick this into my heart?”. You can find more such things using Google Japan. Run a query like [(荒筋 OR あらすじ OR 粗筋) (name of the film in Japanese or original language) 映画]. It’ll get you even meatier explanations of the plot, such as this one.
- Luce e ombra (light and darkness?), by a Japanese person living in Italy. The author, Kanako, has visited this site, so you already know she’s cool. Subject matter is art and personal experiences.
- Ikeda Nobuo writes cool books about economics. And also a runs a blog about it so you can read it for free
. - This blog is all about the musings of a private home tutor. He mainly discusses 国語 (Japanese language) education (for Japanese kids, of course).
- Another blog by someone in the education industry (why do I have so many of these?). This time by a mathematics teacher.
- JSTAGE — The Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic. You can find lots of academic papers here (with a focus on physical science/engineering/computer science) for free. The papers are primarily in Japanese.
That’s all for now. More later 
.
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wenhailin said,
March 9, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
What are some of the websites you use for learning / immersing yourself in Chinese?
nacest said,
March 9, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
Nice! I’ve been waiting for something like this.
kanako said,
March 9, 2008 @ 6:51 pm
紹介していただきありがとうございます！ちなみにluce e ombraは光と影という意味です。
quendidil said,
March 9, 2008 @ 7:48 pm
ラテン語で「Lux et Umbra」だな？
nacest said,
March 9, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
そうですよ、quendidil. The root is obviously latin
Chiro-kun said,
March 9, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
イタリア語も最高だな?
Lloyd said,
March 9, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
Hey, Khatz! Here’s another site that me and some friends are doing. I haven’t posted anything on there yet but another guy who posts here (Saleem), has made the first 2 or 3 posts. It’s pretty much a website devoted to leading Japanese learners to useful native Japanese materials with examples and explanations from the linked source in every post…
http://100japanesethings.wordpress.com/
Christina said,
March 10, 2008 @ 12:49 am
I’m with wenhailin on this one… what Chinese sites do you use?
Also I’ve been meaning to share this site with you: http://www.podcast.sg is full of Chinese (and malay and English) podcasts. I highly recommend 大头芬的世界, which is under the YES933 station, because if you go here: http://www.datoufen.blogspot.com , there are word-for-word transcripts! yippie. Its also relatively easy to understand. good luck
乐恋飞
Rob said,
March 10, 2008 @ 9:41 pm
This may not be new to most, but when I was starting out I didn’t realize that most of the main websites I used also have Japanese versions. Here are some that I use the most:
http://www.google.co.jp/
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
http://jp.youtube.com/
http://www.cnn.co.jp/
http://jp.msn.com/
http://www.apple.com/jp/trailers/
The CNN website is nice because you can also read American news but in Japanese.
mark said,
March 10, 2008 @ 11:02 pm
Does anyone (Khatzu?) know any ‘good’ IT/data comms sites? Obviously there are the vendor sites, but I am talking about news, reviews, blogs, etc.
Thanks!
Mark
Nivaldo said,
March 11, 2008 @ 4:30 am
Well, a little off-topic question: can anyone tell me about タイガー＆ドラゴン. I’ve read about it but I just don’t get the nature of the drama itself. Does it show someone playing(?) rakugo in all the episodes? Does it show the actual characters that are part of the rakugo?…or the story goes around the rakugoka and other characters? In short, the center of the story is around the rakugo or is it around the rakugoka and other characters, making rakugo just a small part of the drama? Sorry for asking this but I’m just not getting it.
bubble said,
March 12, 2008 @ 4:23 am
Rob, that’s cool, but there’s another way to do it, at least in Firefox. If you change the default language to view pages, Google.com and various other pages switch to Japanese just like if you were using the Japanese version specifically, and you get features like the spellcheck in Japanese (for instance, if you were to enter romaji, google might suggest the kanji for you).
Rachel said,
March 12, 2008 @ 6:52 am
http://weathernews.jp/ohaten/ Here you can watch the weather every morning from each region of Japan. You can also watch the weather being reported from Taiwan in Mandarin on this site. It’s pretty cool (^-^).
Tom said,
March 12, 2008 @ 8:48 am
This was actually one of the better posts I’ve seen on this site. As much as some of the “self-help” bits are motivating and what not, sharing blogs and other japanese websites is far more constructive.
fairykarma said,
March 12, 2008 @ 9:05 am
Adding to the Chinese site list.
anti-wave.net
princessremy.net
http://www.voanews.com/chinese/
Jeff said,
March 13, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
I was going to send Khatzumoto an email about this, but I thought other people might have input as well. Any input would be appreciated
I’m approaching 700 sentences on my SRS and I remember seeing somewhere on this website that a recommended place to switch to J-J cards is between 500-800 sentences. I’m excited to try only inputing Japanese in my cards, but I realized that there are still grammatical structures and conjugations that I don’t know. Will an understanding of these just come from continuing with inputting the sentences, or will I still need to look them up in grammar sources. If so is there a particular beginner’s grammar book in Japanese that you used or was that not necessary? Thanks!
khatzumoto said,
March 14, 2008 @ 1:17 am
Jeff
In my experience, a decent 国語 dictionary was/is sufficient for explanations of grammar/structure.
quendidil said,
March 14, 2008 @ 2:44 am
乐恋飞,你也在新加坡吗？
Christina said,
March 14, 2008 @ 10:57 am
quendidil, 我不在新加坡，我在美国
你在新加坡留学吗？
quendidil said,
March 14, 2008 @ 4:04 pm
我是新加坡华侨:P。
但若你真的来到新加坡的话，你得注意到新加坡人的发音是大部分不准确的。像www.podcast.sg的DJ一样发音准确的国民ほとんどいない。:)
Christina said,
March 14, 2008 @ 9:32 pm
quendidil,
你听过那个”大头芬” 的播客吗？她的发音听起来非常标准。但，我知道新加坡人的华语不太准确，所以我只听“大头芬” 呵呵。
顺便问一下，”ほとんどいない” 是什么意思？
quendidil said,
March 15, 2008 @ 7:01 pm
据我所知，使用
quendidil said,
March 15, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
Οops, めんどくせ～ついにクリックしちゃった。
据我所知，“华语”这个单词的使用者只限为东南亚这一带的华人。但是，和“普通话”，“国语”，“官话”
等的名称比较的话，我觉得“汉语”，“华语”等是比较地中立的。
ほとんどいない翻译成中文是“差不多没有”的意思。你不是也在学习日语吗？
Nivaldo said,
March 16, 2008 @ 3:09 am
Oh…I think I forgot to mention the reasons behind my doubt about “Tiger & Dragon” story. It’s just that I’m thinking about downloading the episodes but the download itself will take MONTHS. That’s why I wanted to know in advance what I can encounter in the episodes so that I can know if it’s really worth downloading.
quendidil said,
March 16, 2008 @ 9:22 am
Really? You should tr to configure BT properly.
Basically, in T&D, Rakugo is used as a medium to advance the story, usually a subplot of a main character. Near the beginning, sometimes in the middle, of each episode, you are told a classic rakugo tale. Then, as the episode progresses, parts of it start to resemble the claical plot, until at the end, Kotora, the yakza-rakugo protagonist adapts the classical story completely.
Nivaldo said,
March 16, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
It’s not really the case of configuring the BT, I just have a very short bandwidth. It only allows me to download 10KB/s at best. Besides, on weekdays I have internet only from 7:00PM until 7:00AM and yet I’m allowed only 1 hour and half at home. I calculated that in an hour and half I can download 0.5% of the whole. So, calculating the number of the remaining days was easy but sad, some 200 days which dividing by 30 gives 6 months approx.
About T&D, thanks for giving me it’s nature. It sounds quite interesting. Thank you.
nacest said,
March 16, 2008 @ 5:07 pm
Nivaldo,
If it’s gonna take that long, and occupy most of your bandwidth, and you have a time-based fee, then buying the original DVD *may* be more economical. Certainly easier and faster
Nivaldo said,
March 16, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
Not in Mozambique, though. You know, many times Africa is referred to as third world. I don’t agree entirely. I would give the classification:
Europe, America, some parts of Asia, Australia, Northern Africa and SOUTH Africa and some of the Southern Africa -> first world
poor countries of Europe, America, Asia -> second world
poor countries of Africa(including Mozambique in its ACTUAL state) -> subworld NOT third world
even poorer countries of Africa -> no world practically.
Look, I’m not analyzing regarding peace, or whatever other than economy.
Sorry for the long answer but I think this is all just to say that buying an original DVD just isn’t an option. In Mozambique, there are no japanese multimedia products available.
nacest said,
March 16, 2008 @ 10:51 pm
Well I said that without knowing your location or situation. If that’s the case it’s not a big problem, the internet is the only thing you need! You just need to manage your bandwidth efficiently. What I mean is: be sure to download something that is at your current level, therefore not too high and not too low.
Perhaps you could get just the first 1-2 episodes of T&D before deciding to set out on that looong file transfer.
Nivaldo said,
March 17, 2008 @ 12:07 am
Yeah. I think I’m going for that. In fact, I’m putting all my faith in the theory of the internet’s freeness(?) and it hasn’t let me down so far.
jpavlakovich said,
March 17, 2008 @ 8:07 am
umm…don’t know if this even belongs in here, but I found some online books that some might find useful.
http://sicp.ipl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/epilog.html
In case you wanted to learn scheme?
http://www.linux.or.jp/JF/JFdocs/LFS-BOOK/
These are both somewhat lengthy books. The SICP book was translated by a native speaker.
jpavlakovich said,
March 17, 2008 @ 8:08 am
http://sicp.ipl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
Is the parent link, sorry.
jpavlakovich said,
March 17, 2008 @ 8:24 am
Nevermind, I thought the SCIP was the book in its entirety. An official translation exists somewhere. Sorry
sunagakure said,
March 24, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
Does anyone know any good online japanese radio & tv streams ? I’ve been looking for them for some time with no luck
anders said,
March 27, 2008 @ 1:17 am
sunagakure:
http://www.v2p.jp/video/ ( http://www.v2p.jp/video/Viewer/ )
Live TV-streaming. Somebody else linked to it in previous comment too I think.
Rob said,
March 29, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
I just came across this terrific site for grammar explanations that is entirely in Japanese. It even has example dialogs to illustrate each grammar point.
http://www.nihongo2.com/dictionary/
カズヤ said,
April 6, 2008 @ 11:10 pm
OMG,thank you sssssssooooo much for linking to the goo lyric search site!! I’ve been looking for something like that for….FOREVER.You are my HERO.Seriously.It was driving me nuts…the best I found was one site that gave lyrics only to songs from anime…and the lyrics weren’t always right (I found ridiculous errors…trust me,I don’t know enough Japanese yet for those to be easy to miss) or they were only in *gasp* romaji.*shudder* Finally,I will rid myself of that awful site and move on to better places.
大好きです!!!
Namida said,
August 1, 2008 @ 7:27 pm
Some of these will definitely be a part of my new bookmarks folder. Right now, I seem to have an awful lot of English-language bookmarks, which is odd, what with Japanese being the only language I know. o_O