Japanese Resources
It’s been a bit of a crazy month (illness, death in the family, changes at work, etc) so I’ve been a bit slow with the new posts. It seems everyone with a blog says that, but that’s the nature of things I suppose.
Example of the Rikaichan translator
I was at the game industry nomikai this week and a friend was looking for some good Japanese resources. Instead of hiding them away in an e-mail I thought I put them here so everyone could reference them.
- Rikaichan
An indispensable Firefox plugin for browsing the web in Japanese. Once turned on, you need only hover your mouse over a Japanese word and the definition appears. Very fast and very handy, especially if you have some rudimentary skill in reading. It also works in Thunderbird which is arguably even more useful.
http://www.polarcloud.com/japanese - Slime Forest Adventure
I literally went home one night completely illiterate, played SFA for 3 hours, went out for a break and could literally read one whole Japanese alphabet. For the record, the first Japanese I ever read was “カラオケ” (karaoke) just outside of Yoyogi station. I also learned the second phonetic Japanese alphabet in an additional 3 hours thanks to this great program. Download it now.
http://lrnj.com/ - SpaceALC
I was originally sceptical of this site. I figured Babelfish or one of the other ones would have me covered. In time I found this site to be far more useful, especially for getting accurate translations of individual words. Now I use it almost exclusively; the quality is just that high. Type your word into the search box at the top and you’re away.
http://www.alc.co.jp/ - Excite.co.jp Translator
I don’t use automated translators much any more, but a lot of people still like them. Most of my gaijin friends have abandoned babelfish in favour of Excite’s translator.
http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/