Japanese language resources

Japanese Crosswords for learning Kanji  NEW
These small crossword puzzles are excellent if you want to try your skills with the kanji for the level 4 nouryouku kentei. The crosswords can be downloaded as HTML or PDF.

The Japanese Writing Tour
Here you can learn how to write hiragana, katakana and a range of Kanji. Small animations even show the order of the strokes in each kana!

Alternative Sci.lang.japan FAQ
Ben Bullock's excellent Alternative FAQ for the newsgroup sci.lang.japan

Reading Japanese for Daily Life
Reading Japanese for Daily Life

Phrase of the day (archives)
Pretty difficult but very interesting!

Yomeru.com
News from various newspapers are extracted and furigana are added to make reading easier. Some words are also explained (move the mouse over the word and the explanation pops up), but unfortunately only the easier words have these explanations. Very nice design though, and updated daily!

Asagaku.com
Asahi's "News for Kids" is a very useful site that presents relevant articles written in a much friendlier way than the usual stiff language of Japanese newspapers and with more explanations of terms that are expected to be hard to understand. Never condescending it is a good way to get started on reading real Japanese texts about contemporary issues.

Kanji Gold
A simple but very good flash-card style kanji training program. Covers all the jouhou kanji I think.

JGram
JGram is an interactive community dedicated to helping people learn to speak Japanese, in the most effective interactive way: by communicating, sharing knowledge, and talking between Japanese and non-native speakers.

ALC
One of the best online dictionaries available. Draws on the Eijirou electronic dictionary which contains not only translations of words but also of common phrases with this word! Try searching for "work", and you will also see translations for "It worked", "work a __ day week" etc. This site is a must for all who are serious about learning Japanese.

Rikai.com
Now this is a truly interesting place! Based on the comprehensive (and free) dictionary maintained by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (also known as Jim Breen's EDict) this page translates all words in a page you give it. But! The translation only appear as you move the mouse over the text. Ideally suited for studying! It works well with almost all pages I tried and is very easy to use. You can even add words to a kind of flash card system, and later review them.

Jim Breen's WWWJDIC
An online dictionary and lots of other language related stuff, like a hand-writing input java applet!

If you want to download the original dictionary files, go to this FTP server.

Goo translation
The Japanese search page, Goo, has its own translation service. You can select between the EiWa, WaEi, Kokugo and Shingo dictionaries. Their service cannot translate a page, but only words that you input. So, it is just a dictionary. But it is online, and free.

Excite translation
This page can help you read Japanese pages in that it does a complete translation of the page. Of course it is not perfect, it is not even close. And whether the resulting text is true English or just an incomprehensible jumble of English and Japanese vocabulary is hard to say :)
Just kidding. This is actually an ok page, but, you will never learn proper Japanese from this!

Monash University ACCESS-J Japanese WWW Page Viewer
With this site you can have all the kana and kanji displayed as small graphics in your browser. Perfect if you do not yet have Japanese fonts installed in your web browser!

Japan Times Book club
The best placve I have found yet. Prices are not too high, and they have many good books. For instance the "A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" and the "Intermediate" version.

Kinokuniya
Very popular bookstore in Japan.

CosCom Japanese Language School
Mr. Yoshimura who wrote the two books, is a very nice person indeed, I mailed with him a few times. You can also see online versions of his books. And if you like them I recommend you to support his business by buying the paper-versions.

Sanseido Books
Sanseido Books

Where to find Japanese fonts
Where to find Japanese fonts on the internet.

Marshall's Japanese webpage
Marshall's Japanese webpage

Gray Graphics
A page with really cool katakana fonts