Call me Senpai-chan! ^^^
Japanese language is at the same time one of the toughest and one of the most beautiful languages I've ever learned. Tough, but not "difficult". The grammar part is fairly easy. But Japanese people seem to like things complicated. What makes it so tough and so fascinating to us "westerns", anyway, is the great cultural distance, so that every word is a discovering. I can't remember where it is that I read "language is the reflection of the soul of its people", but that's exactly what I feel ^^^
If you really want to know about Japan then you can't do it without knowing Japanese language.
05/02/2003
I will be uploading here study material and information (_slowly_ ^^^;; )
Sistemi di scrittura del giapponese
Corso di giapponese gratuito al Politecnico di Torino
Kanji exercise
Study material
Sooner or later I'll put up some real reviews, but for now here's the short version.
Dictionaries
For kanji, I mostly use Nelson. It has romaji, but it's the most complete bilingual dictionary (I've ever seen, anyway).
As a general dictionary, I'm using Kodansha's Furigana Dictionary, which is not bad, but only contains few, basic words. It has been written for foreign students, so it offers useful example sentences and expressions, but it's not meant as a "final" work, it's rather a student's first tool. It's a pity they haven't made a more complete version of this dictionary yet.
There is a Japanese-Italian dictionary, Shogakukan dictionary. This dictionary however has been compiled for Japanese users, so, though it it very well done, can be quite useless for a beginning student, especially if you want to translate from Italian to Japanese (then it's pretty expensive, but it's not uncommon for Japanese study material in Italy).
Textbooks
Ihad my first look into japanese thanks to free online documents. First of all, "quick and dirty guide to Japanese Grammar", which is exactly what its name says, that is a short panoramic on essential aspects of Japanese grammar. The paragraph about adjectives is quite poorly done, but the rest is rather good as a first approach. Normally I hate "roomaji" (write Japanese words in Roman alphabet), but for this document I feel the roomaji version is the best. Another panoramic, with much more detail, is "Some Notes on Japanese Grammar" by Keith Smillie. You can find both on professor Jim Breen's web page (see also below, in the links section).
For studying kanji, a good text seems to me Tuttle's "Kanji and kana". It features many kanji. Up to now I've not tried it yet, just peered a bit.
There is also a series of small books by Kodansha (called power japanese) fairly well done, and fairly expensive (if you buy them in Italy). I'm using mostly "All about particles" and "Basic connections", the latter of which deals with formation of non-elementary sentences (but also clarifies some conjunctions and expressions). Anyway, books in this series are not textbooks, just in-depth material.
Writing Japanese on computer
Japanese version of Windows has always had to deal with Japanese characters. Lately, even non-Japanese versions are coming to include utilities for oriental languages.
It is possible to update word with file JpnSupp.exe (in Word, you can go as far as inserting furigana); as for Internet explorer you need a file called ie3lpkja.exe. You can find both here. That said, these just provide access to files already encoded in Japanese; if you want to type in there's the new IME (but I don't use it, so I don't know how it works). I'm already using another program. Warning: at least in versions earlier than XP, if you want to print Japanese characters you have to set, in the printer's options menu, "print true type characters as graphic". Another warning: if you have an earlier version of Word than word 2000, you still can not update it fully. Older versions may just open files, or sometimes sternly refuse to deal with such strange matters as Japanese characters.
Anyway the best on the place is, IMHO, JWPce (written for Windows CE, but perfectly going along with XP too). Other than allowing you to type naturally in hiragana, katakana and kanji, you can also use it to open free dictionary files (Japanese-english, obviously, they may not be perfect, but they're more than just rather good) and has fairly quick and efficient kanji look-up methods. You can find JWPce here.
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