Next year I’m hoping to bag the JLPT 1, which is a helpful if somewhat archaic measure of Japanese ability that is useful proof to show to companies / scholarship foundations or annoy friends with at parties. It theoretically covers all the day to day kanji you would need to, say, read a newspaper, roughly 2000. Despite its drawbacks, I’ve definitely benefited from a more focused vocabulary building, and the consensus among me and friends much better at Japanese than me is, it doesn’t matter what your system is, you just need a system. Furthermore, the tests are happening twice a year now in Japan and its a little 6 monthly motivator to do some studying.
So, 2009 has been the technological boom year for Japanese study. I think I came by rikai chan last year, and it seemed like the bar had been set, but no, this year has offered even more. Majorly helped along by the iphone. (rikai chan, for those still surrounded by paper dictionaries, is a firefox plugin with a look-up J->E dictionary and also a tool for providing both the reading and English definition of any Japanese text on the web. It’s got phrases as well as words, and they’ve just updated the names dictionary which is working super smooth now – just press enter twice on the lookup bar)
So, where to begin..
This is a program based on ’spaced repetition memory system’ which is basically where the computer calculates which how well you know a piece of knowledge that you’ve stored on the program based on your answers after having flipped the computer flash cards. Did you find it easy / good / hard or you need to see it again? From there, the computer calculates how long until you should see that card again. Each card then accumulates a history of your learning of it. The idea being that it catches you in time before you forget, and aids the transition into long term memory. You can do this with paper but the computer is doing some difficult and tedious calculations to constantly be on top of which ones you know and which ones you don’t. Anki could actually be used for learning anything where you need memory based learning, but as the name suggests, creator Damien Elmes made it with Japanese in mind. There are a bunch of freeware SRMS programs out there, but I like anki for some important reasons.
1) A community has started to build up around it and now 3rd party plugins are easily available. This mean individual words that you add to your ‘knowledge’ library can be much more easily assimilated using my favourite plugin – example sentences using Professor Yasuhito Tanaka’s 180,000 english-japanese paired sentences. Go to File>Download>shared plugin then pick ‘example sentences’
2) Its connected to an internet server so you can pick up where you left off by studying online at the office or wherever. A free iphone app called StudyArcade also connects to this server so you can use it on your phone.
3) You can tally how many kanji you’ve learnt and at what level, or just see which ones you’ve missed. Make sure to download Japanese Support File>download>shared plugin> Japanese support
4) Although I don’t use this function, because I found adding content myself is the most effective way to learn, there are pre-made knowledge decks of all JLPT levels, Heisig, and no doubt a number of other popular learning systems
Downsides?
Well, yeah,
1) The user interface is a tiny bit counter intuitive to begin with, so don’t be surprised if it takes you half an hour or so to figure out how to make the kind of flash cards you want
2) There’s no iphone app yet!!! Would definitely pay a few bucks for the ability to use this seamlessly on my phone. StudyArcade is an OKish substitute, but, you don’t get the example sentences plugin, the synch function is only one way – so when you get home the cards you practiced on the train aren’t logged so they are still ‘due’ for revision on the main anki server, and StudyArcade’s developer often lags behind updates with Anki, so a couple of times this year, owing to Anki’s new updates, StudyArcade couldn’t access the server and pull new cards. At one point I was adding 20 new words a day so the stuff on my phone soon got out of date.
Next is….
I just found this 2 days ago. How I love it! Its really simple, just an online Nelson basically. I have a paper Nelson dictionary, 20 years old, falling apart from my mum…. but it has to be quite a kanji emergency for me to whip it out. Usually I just ineffectively type in the sound of the radical I think is giving the yomi-kata and hope its in the same family and will therefore be listed on the computer… seriously lazy and often futile. But no more! Denshi Jisho is a really simple search by radical tool. I don’t know why I couldn’t find one of these before. Thanks very much Kim Ahlström for developing it.
Ok so this one looks like its been there since the 90s based on the design of the site…. no offence…. but this is a great tool for the other thing I used Nelson for, once upon a time… that is finding vocab associated with a particular kanji. Great for vocabulary building around kanji you already know – which is a great confidence booster. I’m not sure if this is related to rikaichan. Developed by Todd David Rudick. If you land on the home page it can be disorientating with all kinds of unrelated content. Stick to the map.
shinkanji
Next, something I’ve been looking for for a while. a drawable kanji look-up tool for my iphone. I figured there must be hundreds, but only landed on shinkanji today after a long search. I haven’t been able to find a free app that does this, and shelled out £3.49 for it, but so worth it for quick kanji recognition.
So that’s what I’ve been using this year.
Lastly,
I also came across this Kanji Reader device for that pesky portion of text that isn’t digitised. It looked like it could be quite good except that its $300 and the dictionary didn’t seem to be that big.
So what have all of the above tools – bar the kanji reader – got in common? Well, it’s this nice man, Jim Breen.
Like many of the above heroes of modern Japanese learning, he’s first and foremost a specialist in computer science. And somehow on top of that, he has created what must be the most widely distributed Japanese-English resource on the web. Its open source and mirrored in several locations making it nice and speedy to access. I’d venture that even a lot of the paid dictionary apps on the iphone have probably come from this free resource. The dictionary as it stands now consists of 130,000 entries, 720,000 names – notoriously difficult to fathom the reading of – and the Tanaka Corpus I mentioned in regard to the example sentences plug in for anki, is another branch of the WWWJDIC project which besides Mr. Breen is supported by some other key developers. check out Jim’s page for a huge list of Japanese resources, everything from Japanese Linux operating system software to how to get divorced in Japan.
I couldn’t thank all these people enough, no time has it been easier to access Japanese language tools than 2009, now there’s no excuse other than my own time and commitment!
