Community Language Lab

Digital Dialects has loads of animated activities and games that are intended to provide a relaxed way of acquiring basic language skills, and a great break from the books!

Click on the links below to access the search results for Japanese language resources in the library.

Language Study Sound Recordings: Japanese language instruction on CD, tapes, and LP.

Other Sound Recordings: Japanese music on CD, tapes, and LP.

Dictionaries: Japanese-English, English-Japanese, Kanji, idioms, and more.

Readers: Practice reading real Japanese.

Texts: Language courses, phrase books, grammar, and writing.

A companion to the Genki textbook series used by Japanese language classes at Evergreen, the "Self-Study Room" features quizzes, games, flashcard sets, and more.  Reading and writing practice for the kana and kanji, vocabulary, grammar structures and conjugation as well as links to outside websites designed to follow the Genki text.

The University of Michigan has created charts of the 46 characters in the hiragana syllabary. Click on any of the characters to see the stroke order and hear audio of pronunciation.

Internet Polyglot is an online flashcard system which uses games and drills designed to help you retain vocabulary.  Build your own lessons, steal from other users, or use the ready-made sets.

Language Guide introduces language learners to vocabulary through sound, pictures, and writing so that every new term is reinforced visually and aurally. If you are just starting out or want to supplement the vocabulary in your textbook, the clustering of the vocabulary into categories like numbers or body parts makes it easy for you to find what you want to work on.

The Meguro Language Center in Tokyo has tons of free downloadable worksheets and activities for language learning, including kana practice sheets, particle overviews, audio files, flashcards, and more.  (Scroll down for the good stuff).

Polar Cloud's Rikaichan plug-in for Mozilla Firefox makes reading Japanese websites quick and easy.  In Firefox, install the Main Extension, the Japanese-English dictionary, and--if you want to--the Names dictionary.  (Restart Firefox between each of the installations).  Once you are on a Japanese webpage, right click and select "Rikaichan" to enable it for that tab.  Every page you visit in that tab will have Rikaichan enabled.  Then, simply roll over any kanji with your mouse to see readings, English definitions, compounds, etc.  SOOOO easy!!!

Visit Omniglot for information about the writing system for this language and many others, including designed languages like Klingon. Each page includes the full alphabet or syllabary for a particular language, plus a pronunciation guide in the International Phonetic Alphabet and transliterations of sample text into the Roman alphabet.