Installation is quick and simple and does offer a name database as well. The plug-in is activated by right-clicking any page and picking Rikachan from the context menu. Hovering your mouse over a word in Japanese in a homepage will then automatically prompt a pop-up translation.

A small but great plug-in for reading Japanese web pages.

ウエッブぜんやく！

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

The program is not only a dictionary but is designed to be able to write or read documents in Japanese as well as convert Hiragana and Katakana into Kanji and supply translations to them. I have included a picture of the JWPce main window below accompanied by descriptions of the main features.

1,2,3 – The first three buttons switch between the different character input modes. Ascii(1: shortkey Ctrl+A), Hiragana/Kanji(2: shortkey Ctrl+K), and Jascii(3: shortkey Ctrl+J). The difference between ascii and jascii is merely japanese character spacing. Input mode can also be toggled by clicking the notice on the statusbar. In order to input Katakana use the Hiragana/Kanji input and input the Romaji in capitals, using either Shift or Caps-Lock.

4 – Kanji conversion (shortkey F2). In order to translate Hiragana or Katakana into proper Kanji, mark the selected characters and using the conversion feature. A list of possible alternatives will be shown in the Kanji list.

5 – Character Info (shortkey Ctrl+I). This feature will show information about the first character selected. Including both possible meanings and pronunciation.

6 – JIS Table (shortkey (Ctrl+T). The JIS table shows a very extensive list of both Hiragana, Katakana, symbols, and Kanji that can be used to directly paste into your document, be copied to your clipboard, or be opened in the Character Info feature (see 5).

7 – Dictionary (shortkey (Ctrl+D or F6). This is by far my favorite feature of JWPce. Even if you can only search one word or a short construct at a time, you can use either Hiragana/Katakana or English to search the dictionary. The feature shows both exact matches and matches that are judged to be close or similar. I have yet to find an easier or more comprehensive free software dictionary. This being said translations are not always obvious. For example 俺（おれ）(n) I (ego) (boastful first-person pronoun), (P). Leaving out for example that the pronoun would only be used by men.

8 – Count Kanji, I assume it is something akin to the word count in Word to give some statistics about your current document. I cannot think of any major practical use for the feature off the top of my head but I am sure there are some uses.

9 – Radical Lookup (shortkey Ctrl+L). Gives the ability to enter separate radicals and form them into Kanji. I assume its’ use would be to construct Kanji through combining radicals on your own.

10-16 – Bushu Lookup (10: shortkey Ctrl+Shift+L) Bushu Stroke/Lookup (11: shortkey Ctrl+Shift+B), SKIP Lookup (12: shortkey Ctrl+Shift+S), Hadamitzky/Spahn Lookup (13: shortkey Ctrl+H), Four-Corner Lookup(14: shortkey Ctrl+4), Reading Lookup(15: shortkey Ctrl+Shift+R), Index Lookup (16: shortkey Ctrl+Shift+I). Similarly to the Radical Lookup (9) these are all searchfeatures of various kinds, personally I haven’t yet felt like I needed them and I haven’t really gone in-depth to how they actually work. If you are really interested I suggest reading up on it further in the JWPce user manual.

What i like about the JWPce is the span of usage. It is very easy to get a hang of from the start but there is a whole lot of features underneath the surface. At first glance though these features seem somewhat confusing and very complicated.

俺は語彙力広げる！

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

In order to type in Japanese in Windows you need to install something called Microsoft IME. (yes frankly if you’re using Mac or Linux I’ll just consider you a lost cause and leave it at that. Just figure it out yourselves, there should be something similar)  You install this in the same way you would install any new keyboard setup by using the “Windows Control Panel” and clicking “Region and Languages”, under the” Keyboards and Languages” tab there is a button labeled “Change Keyboards”. This button opens a new window which allows you to add additional keyboard setups. When adding a new keyboard just expand the Japanese branch and mark the Microsoft IME button. When applying this you will most likely need your Windows CD/DVD’s unless you have pre-installed the full language pack when installing Windows. Please note the exact names are only correct for Windows 7 as that is what I am currently using and the process in XP or Vista will be slightly different when it comes to names of icons and tabs, but the general principle remains the same.

You now have a language bar on the bottom right corner of your screen attached right next to your system bar. The letters indicate which language your keyboard is currently set to. This can be easily changed by either clicking the icon and setting it to “Japanese” or by pressing “Alt+Shift”, since I am long used to switching between American and Swedish keyboard layouts I have gotten so used to it I hardly notice it any more.

What you will realize is the difference in complexity between the normal English/Latin language bars and the IME language bar. Where the regular language bar merely has two letters indicating the language your keyboard is currently set to, the IME has several other buttons as shown below.

Microsoft IME Bar

The First button allows you to choose between IME and the other Japanese keyboards available, as I have only needed IME so far I am afraid I haven’t yet tried the other ones.

The Second button switches input modes between Hiragana, Katakana or Alphanumeric characters. You can switch between Hiragana and Alphanumerics by using F6 and Between Hiragana and Katakana by using F7, or select between all the options using the context menu of course. There are also Half-width versions of both Katakana and Alphanumerics which I am not sure of why yet but I guess it will explain itself in due time.

The Third button is to set the Kanji conversion modes. Switching between these modes I assume are mostly useful for when you know you will be either using conversational speech or writing mainly names, as one set of Hiragana can convert into a dozen or more different Kanji it might be preferrable, I have yet to touch this feature either though since my level is still so basic.

The Fourth button opens the “IME pad” which contains a number of features reasonably selfexplainatory, the Windows 7 version contains a free drawing character recognition, a full character list of as far as i can see all characters in any languages I can come up with, a stroke guide, and radical list.

The Fifth and final button in the list opens a context menu where you can again open the IME Pad, or use a few other features like “Add word or entry”, “Properties” which opens the general IME keyboard properties, and a “Dictionary” feature. I have yet to use either the dictionary feature or the add word or entry feature as I am currently using another program for my vocabulary needs (which i will review in another post) that so far seems to work reasonably well.

There are also two indicator buttons for “Caps-lock” and forced “Kana” the prior I am not really sure what it does since as far as I know there are no upper or lower case characters in Japanese in the same sense as in Western languages. The Kana lock as far as I know only useful if you have a Kana-adapted keyboard or are very very familiar with them, as one key resembles a full kana instead of constructing them through using Romaji to Kana conversion with a QWERTY keyboard.. These can probably greatly increase writing speed when writing long sessions, but as said, unless you have a Kana keyboard you will have hell trying to learn the key-setup.

To input Hiragana while using IME you merely have to activate the Hiragana input and type as you would in Romaji and it automatically converts your letters to Hiragana.

While using the IME to type Hiragana you can also convert your Hiragana into Kanji by a simple press of your “Space-bar”. This will show you a list of possible Kanji conversions to choose from, so as long as you know which one you’re after it is simple to toggle through them using space or using your mouse. Sometimes there can be a quite large amount of possible Kanji however, and if you want to page-down 10 alternatives at a time press “Shift + Space-Bar”.

All in all a surprisingly intuitive way of typing in Japanese, something that I, before I tried it, dreaded would be an awfully complicated task.

日本語タッチタイピングがんばれ！

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

The textbook goes through the basic grammatical structure of Japanese very quickly and briefly, I assume it will elaborate more later because things like postpositions (particles) don’t make all that much sense without being put into proper context.

Verb construction with ru-verbs, u-verbs and て-verbs don’t either seem completely obvious without a more in-depth lessons and I assume I will dedicate at least one post to each at one time or another. There are some verbal inflection charts that I am probably going to have to go over a bit more closely, this week I mainly focused on the basics and am gonna try to go back and have a second look of that during the week.

Another thing that seems somewhat unclear to me at the moment is the use of は(wa) as a topic marker. To begin with why it is written は and not わmakes little sense to me at the moment. The use of the marker is noted to be one of the hardest part by the author and I’m just hoping its not similar to grammatical gender forms in Swedish, German or Dutch.

The conversational parts and actual constructs seem like the easiest part at first glance. It’s impressive how many different phrases you can construct in baby-Japanese with virtually nothing more than a few nouns, です、いいです、じゃありません and a few supporting grammatical markers. Still proceeding at baby-level I can now construct questions using　これは、なん ですか as well as actually answer them.

I was surprised to learn the lack of Kanji in the start-out phases of the book, the only one i have encountered so far is 本（ほん） = book, but I guess its better to stick to Hiragana and Katakana while still trying to make sense of the general sentence structure and how verbals work at all.

倦怠ですか？  倦怠ですよ！俺はまっと向上必着です！

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

The approach i used to Katakana was somewhat different from what I used for the Hiragana. As I already knew the Hiragana reasonably well I decided to first copy down both Hiragana and Katakana more along the combined Hiragana/Katakana table in Japanese for Everyone except I made a line or two of repetitions for every character of both alphabets to get a better feel for how the characters are written. As with Hiragana, I suggest using japanese.about.com or something similar to get the stroke-order right from the very beginning.

After letting this sink in a day or two i did roughly a thousand repetitions on realkana.com set to only Katakana to grind them in a bit better. This seems to have worked reasonably well. A few days later, today, I did another 1000, this time using both all Hiragana and all Katakana, the results shown above. Good enough for now, hopefully grind them in more just by reading and writing in general. Next stop grammar and to start with actual Kanji!

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

However both these books are better for reference rather than actually learning how to write the characters. I would suggest Japanese.about.com’s tutorials on Hiragana and Katakana in order to learn how to write. I preferred them over the books since they are more in-depth and they especially show the stroke order. Both recognizing the importance of this from my old Mandarin classes and combined with the fact that the line-order in Japanese sometimes is even more illogical than in Mandarin a lot of the time, I would really suggest these online-lessons in front of either of the books.

可愛い猫　also recommended me realkana.com for actually grinding both Hiragana and Katakana into memory. It took me about 2000 runs of Hiragana before I was reasonably fluent and I expect Katakana to be somewhat similar.

Since both alphabets frankly have 107 characters each (including や/ゆ/よ forms) I realized it might be somewhat overwhelming to try to learn both alphabets at once and decided to learn first Hiragana which seems generally expressed as the most important one and then picking up Katakana once the Hiragana was actually in. This seems to have worked reasonably well, at least with Hiragana so far. However, the Hiragana/Katakana table in Japanese for Everyone has a different approach than the others, laid out with every character in Hiragana/Katakana/Romaji, instead of separating Hiragana and Katakana into seperate tables. I’m not sure of this approach, and i especially imagine that in the beginning keeping Hiragana and Katakana separate after learning them this way, could be difficult, and therefore decided I will just keep going with my old way and pick up more from the book once I am done.

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

The first books i started learning the Hiragana and Katakana from were the following:

Library Textbooks

From the top left:

• Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne P. Lammers
• Teach Yourself Beginner’s Japanese by Helen Gilhooly (both CD and Book)
• Japanese Grammar, Second Edition by Carol and Nobuo Akiyama

However, the only books i have ended up actually using are Japanese the Manga Way and Japanese Grammar, Second Edition. The prior preferred merely due to the size of the book making it much easier to make out and distinguish signs from each-other. One part I found both books unfortunately lacking in was actual stroke-orders and for example やis very awkwardly drawn which made me need to relearn how to write it.

Japanese for Everyone －日本語

Beginning of this week Japanese for Everyone finally arrived. I decided to try using this as my main textbook based on both advice on The Japanesepage, and reviews of the other books on Amazon. From what I understand the new edition from 2008 is supposed to be quite a lot better than the old edition (from 1990). I have not yet had time to dig deeper into this book but hopefully I should be finished with the Katakana this week and be able to move on.

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~

~ Stefan / 気難しい猫 ~