j a p a n e s e   r e s o u r c e s

"japanese is easy stuff."

yeah. and to quote an old friend from the 80s: "and monkeys might fly outta my butt."

spoken japanese is relatively easy. once you get past the grammar structure that's dramatically different from any european or western language, spoken japanese is utterly logical, sensisble, and actually rather simple. written japanese, on the other hand--which is personally my favorite part--is a royal pain in the butt. even the japanese think so. (ask one)

with that in mind, i decided to throw together a page about the japanese language, geared towards readers and translators of manga. mind you, this isn't intended nor will it ever be a comprehensive tutorial on japanese. what it will be is a resource center for people who already know a little japanese (or at least have some interest) and who want to learn more or be able to understand some of their manga.

i would really, by the way, recommend having a japanese-enabled browser (preferably ie4+) for the following pages. many of the examples are given in japanese encoding, which netscape handles poorly (when it bothers to handle it at all). if you're using ie and don't have japanese support enabled, you can go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download the japanese language pack for internet explorer.

:: kana reference chart (characters in gif format)

each character is about 1k in size, so the sum total ends up being a little over 140k... but the images are real crisp and organized well.

:: japanese pronouns

the ever-elusive subject of japanese personal pronouns explained... sort of.

:: furigana

ever wonder what those tiny kana beside the kanji are, or what people mean when they refer to "furigana"? this is the page for you.

:: anc vocabulary lists [vol1] [vol2]

when i was first reading ayashi no ceres, i used jwpce to type up a vocabulary list of the words i wasn't familiar with at that time. i saved these lists, and now i'm posting them for anyone who might find them useful. you'll need a japanese-enabled web browser to view these pages.

:: glenn rosenthal's jwpce

the absolute best free japanese word processor for english operating systems. features a customizable kanji dictionary, radical lookup, and the ability to import and save as any of the various japanese text encoding methods. (that, incidentally, is how i write the japanese portions of my web page, and how i create the japanese graphics) best of all, if you have a windows ce palmtop, there's even a version that will run on that.

:: jeffrey's j-e dictionary server

one of the most versatile japanese <-> english servers i've ever seen. i use it extensively, especially when i don't have access to jwpce (especially considering that the two of them have nearly identical content). you can also do kanji and radical lookups if you know what you're looking for. if you have a japanese-enabled browser, you can go to his japanese-enabled page, which provides much quicker lookups (since it doesn't have to load all those gifs). this is what i use for the translation box at the top of this page.

:: ste-chan's kanji of the day

although steve hasn't updated this section of his page in over the year, there's still a lot of good kanji information here, especially on the otherwise-bewildering four-character compounds. his "you've been in japan too long when..." page is absolutely hilarious (living with a japanese seems to make it just as funny).

:: kansai-ben

an informative and occasionally amusing page in english about the kansai dialect of southwestern japan. worth a visit, if for no reason other than to understand what the heck suzumi is saying half the time. watase-sensei herself is from osaka, so a character speaking kansai-ben or osaka-ben is inevitable.