Teegzworld

Displaying and Inputting Japanese Text

Do you only see squares or gobbledygook where Japanese text should be? You wanna know how to get it so you can see all the pretty Japanese characters? Go on then I'll tell you:

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Displaying and Inputting Japanese Text

Do you only see squares or gobbledygook where Japanese text should be? You wanna know how to get it so you can see all the pretty Japanese characters? Go on then I'll tell you:

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First familiarise yourself with your browser encoding settings (usually: view > encoding). Usually "automatic selection" should work, but sometimes you need to select different options in the 'Japanese' part. But, encoding can't work without some form of a language pack, so we'd better install one, eh?

| Windows Vista | Windows XP | Mac OS X | Linux | Nokia 770 |

Windows Vista:

Vista comes with built in support for Japanese characters. If you want to add Japanese as an input language then go to:
Control Panel>Clock, Language, and Region>Change Keyboards or other input methods>Change Keyboards
Click Add, find Japanese in the list, and check the Microsoft IME box. Click OK.
Click the "Language Bar" tab at the top of the window, and make sure either "Floating on Desktop" or "Docked in the taskbar" are selected. Click OK.
Now you can switch to Japanese on a program-by-program basis using the language bar.
Hotkeys:
Alt+shift -- Switch languages
Shift+CapsLock -- Toggle alpha-numeric and hiragana
Alt+CapsLock -- Switch to katakana. If in alpha-numeric mode it switches to hiragana first, which is annoying.
Ctrl+CapsLock -- Switch from katakana back to hiragana.
Spacebar -- After typing some stuff in, converts it to other forms such as kanji. Press twice for a list of options.
Enter -- Accept the text as entered, or as selected after pressing spacebar.
*To input the 'n' syllable (ん or ン) you have to press n twice. So to type in な (na) type 'na', but to type in んな (nna) type 'nnna'.
^ back to menu ^

Windows XP:

The aim is to add support for East Asian languages. It's really simple. You will most likely need your Windows CD.

Open up Control Panel (Category View), and click "Date, Time ... Options", and then "Add other languages".
Find and check the box that says "Add support for East Asian languages". Click Apply, OK, etc.
Done.
Simple! You might need to reboot...?

Also, if you click the "Details" button at the top you can also add Japanese for input if you want. Once you have added it, enable your language bar (look at the bottom of the window you just opened by pressing the "Details" button), then you can change to Japanese on a program by program basis.
Hotkeys:
Alt+shift -- Switch languages
Shift+CapsLock -- Toggle alpha-numeric and hiragana
Alt+CapsLock -- Switch to katakana. If in alpha-numeric mode it switches to hiragana first, which is annoying.
Ctrl+CapsLock -- Switch from katakana back to hiragana.
Spacebar -- After typing some stuff in, converts it to other forms such as kanji. Press twice for a list of options.
Enter -- Accept the text as entered, or as selected after pressing spacebar.
*To input the 'n' syllable (ん or ン) you have to press n twice. So to type in な (na) type 'na', but to type in んな (nna) type 'nnna'.
^ back to menu ^

Mac OS X

See this page: Christopher Bolton's Japanese for Your Mac.
^ back to menu ^

Linux

I don't use Linux much, but I did have Ubuntu at one point and character display worked fine on that. No idea about input...
^ back to menu ^

Nokia 770

You can't input Japanese text on the Nokia 770, but you can get it to display it. From what I have heard the new version of the Nokia internet tablet will/does support Japanese for both display and input.

FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I make no claims to their accuracy, nor do I guarantee that you won't ruin your Nokia 770 in following them.

You will need to download and install X Terminal (xterm) and Dropbear from maemo.org.

If you have already enabled "sudo gainroot", skip this little bit, if not, read on!
If, like me, you can't be bothered to enable the "sudo gainroot" command, then use the command:
$ dbclient root@127.1
When prompted for password enter "rootme".
Once you have done that you are connected to your Nokia 770 as root, and can skip the 'sudo gainroot' command. If you disconnect (close xterm) at any point, you will need to input the command again to get access to root privileges.

To install Japanese font:

Download sazanami-gothic.ttf and copy it to your memory card.

Run xterm then:
$ sudo gainroot
$ cp /media/mmc1/sazanami-gothic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/
$ fc-cache –f
Exit xterm
Reboot device

Instructions made with reference to:
http://guoyong.org/2006/09/08/269
http://oafbot.com/news/?p=57
^ back to menu ^

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Pronunciation Guide

Making the sounds of Japanese is relatively easy, with practice, given that there are relatively few sounds.

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Pronunciation Guide

Making the sounds of Japanese is relatively easy, with practice, given that there are relatively few sounds.

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The sounds not in English are: FU, TSU, JI/ZI, and RA, RI, RU, RE, RO.
I'll get to those later. Now let's start with the vowel sounds.

Vowel Sounds:

a = "ah"; as in "party"
i = "ee"; as in "list"
u = "ooh"; as in "flute"
e = "eh"; as in "lent"
o = "oh"; as in "font"
Double vowels (aa/ā, ii, uu/ū, ee/ē, oo/ō) do not change sound like they often do in English. The sound is merely extended another beat.
For example, ookii/ōkii (big) is pronounced "ohh~ki~", not "ooh~ki~".
Note the macron over the a, u, e, and o. These represent the double vowel. I prefer them as they avoid the problems with changing the vowel sound by accident.
ō is also used to represent the 'ou' combination. In this case again, the o sound doesn't change, it is only extended.

Sounds Not in English:

fu = Much softer F than in English. More like blowing a puff of air through slightly pursed lips.
tsu = Pretty much as you would expect from the romanisation, only it is a single syllable. It can be tempting to treat is as a 't' with a 'su' on the end, but it isn't.
ji/zi = This is a tricky one to explain without hearing it. It is kind of in between 'ji' and 'zi'; to my ear it is closer to English 'ji' in sound, and though it isn't the same, it's not too bad. This syllable can be romanised as either 'ji' or 'zi', but isn't pronounced any differently.
ra, ri, ru, re, ro = The Japanese R is half way between an R and an L. The tongue touches at the top of the mouth behind the teeth, but doesn't touch the teeth. (Contrast this with the English L where you push your tongue into the back of your teeth)
The r-syllables can be romanised interchangeably as R or L. I use R by default and L if it gives a better effect (as in "solo solo" [it's time I was going]).

The N Syllable:

In Japanese 'n' can stand alone as a single syllable. It is not always clear in romaji whether an n+vowel is a single syllable, or an n-syllable and a vowel-syllable. The kanas are always preferable, but in this case especially.
The n-syllable is pronounced like "un" but with hardly any of the u sound.
When in a word, if the n-syllable is followed by a b, p, or m, it is pronounced as an 'm' sound; it is the easier way to pronounce it than trying to maintain the 'n' sound.

General Pronunciation:

For some syllables the vowel sound is not as fully pronounced as you might expect. The syllables this generally happens with is ku, shi, su, and chi. It is easiest to consider examples:
たくさん (takusan) "many". Reading the romaji, you would expect it to be tah-koo-san, but it is actually pronounced more like tack-san.
よろしく (yoroshiku) "please remember me/best regards". This is pronounced like yoh-roh-shh-koo.
です (desu) polite copula. This is sometimes pronounced deh-soo, as you would expect, but it is often also pronounced more like dess as well. The same thing happens with the polite verb ending ます (masu)
一 (ichi) "one". This can be pronounced either like itchy or like itch.
Even though in indicating the pronunciations I have written some versions as if they have fewer syllables, every syllable in Japanese is just as important as every other, and you have to remember that. There is no stress on syllables like there is in English (we usually stress the first syllable, as in "advert", but sometimes the second, as in "advertisement" [British pronunciation], and then just cram in the rest after it), and even when the vowel sound in a syllable is not fully pronounced, it is still pronounced to some degree, because it is part of the syllable. です (desu) isn't pronounced exactly as we would pronounce dess, there has to be consideration of the 'u' sound given. And that goes for the other examples too. It takes practice, but you get used to it in time.

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Kanji

There are three writing systems used in Japanese. The two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are very easy to learn, and kanji.
Kanji stand in stark contrast to the syllabaries, in that they are really difficult to learn! But there are ways...read on...

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Kanji

There are three writing systems used in Japanese. The two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are very easy to learn, and kanji.
Kanji stand in stark contrast to the syllabaries, in that they are really difficult to learn! But there are ways...read on...

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What are kanji?
Kanji are often referred to as ideograms, but they are more accurately termed 'logograms'--where a character represents a word or a meaningful unit of language (a morpheme).
For example, 中 (naka) represents the morpheme (and word) "middle". You can see it clearly as a morpheme in the word 中学 (chūgaku) "middle school". In this case English uses two morphemes in separate words, but Japanese uses two morphemes in a single word.

"Hey, why did it change pronunciation then?" I hear you cry!
There are two basic groups of "readings" (ways of pronouncing) for kanji characters: "Kunyomi" (Japanese pronunciation) and "Onyomi" (Japanese approximation of Chinese pronunciation). These names are frequently abbreviated to "kun" and "ON" (it is convention to use lower-case [or hiragana] for kun readings, and upper-case [or katakana] for ON readings). Sometimes a kanji only has one of each; sometimes it has only kun; sometimes only ON; sometimes it has many of both.

When ON and kun pronunciations are used:
This is important for getting to grips with kanji, because in order to be able to look up a word in your word dictionary, you need to know how it is read. For this you need a character dictionary, which will give you a list of various ON and kun readings for a character. Rather than exhaustively searching through every reading and combination of readings though, you can apply a handy little rule to narrow the odds:
Adjectives and verbs mostly use kunyomi. These words are often identifiable by their use of okurigana (hiragana characters that trail kanji). These characters are there specifically because these are the words that conjugate to different forms for things such as past tense, negation etc etc, and it is in the okurigana that the change generally takes place.
Nouns composed of only one kanji usually use kunyomi, whereas nouns composed of multiple kanji ('compound' nouns) generally use onyomi. This rule doesn't always hold true, but it is useful as a guide to help you on your way.
Some examples:
暑い "is/will be hot", adjective. Kun: atsui. Sample conjugation: 暑かった atsukatta, (plain past) "was hot".
食べる "to eat", verb. Kun: taberu. Sample conjugation: 食べません tabemasen, (polite negative) "to not eat".
体 "body", noun. Only one kanji so kun: karada.
体力 "physical strength", noun. Two kanji so ON for each: tairyoku.

Finding the readings:
What type of dictionary should a beginner get for characters? Probably, it isn't worth the investment in a huge comprehensive character dictionary right away. It'll be more confusing than helpful.
What I recommend is a simple reference book that covers all ~2000 of the jōyō kanji (the "official" list of everyday kanji).
I use the following:

Essential Kanji

by P.G. O'Neill

This books gives the characters you will need most often. It presents the characters in "calligraphic style", with stroke numbers, and in normal "pen style", which is really handy so you can see how real Japanese people write it. Also the characters as displayed on the computer can be seen in the sample words for each entry.
Entries are all in a single standard format, designed so that a piece of card cut to the right shape can hide various information for self-testing etc.
The method of look-up with this book is stroke count, so to use this you need to be familiar with how to count strokes, and therefore how Japanese strokes are made. Let's Learn Kanji (see "Reviews of Learning Materials" below) covers this thoroughly, but let's take a quick look now:

Stroke counts:
Kanji are written thusly:
Start on the left, work to the right, then down. Diagonal strokes come from top to bottom no matter of their direction.
Examples (links are to Jim Breen's WWWJDIC stroke order examples [new window]):
日 (sun); 4 strokes.
中 (middle/inside); 4 strokes.
木 (tree); 4 strokes.
森 (a wood); 12 strokes.
時 (time); 10 strokes.
On the left-side of the last one you can see a mini version of the first character 日 (sun). This is a "radical", and their stroke order is almost always the same as if they were on their own. So effectively with a multi-radical kanji, you move from radical to radical in whatever order is correct--so for 森, which has 3 radicals (all 'tree'), you start with the top radical, then the bottom left, then the bottom right.
So, now we have a rough idea of how to write a character we encounter, we can have a stab at how many strokes it is made up of, by imagining writing it. Have a go. Imagine writing these, and count the strokes. Click the link and count the actual strokes to see if you were right:
休 (rest) link; 海 (sea) link (being slightly wrong on the order doesn't matter, unless you are actually writing it); 驚 (surprise) link.
Don't worry about the last one! Sometimes you have to zoom in to be able to see well enough...

Getting on with it:
Now you should have the tools to be able to deal with most of the characters in natural Japanese. But when faced with an actual sentence, it can be hard to know where to start. Let's translate a sentence, shall we:
今回、私は焼き鳥を食べた。
First, lets spot particles. We have は (wa), the topic particle, and を (wo), the object marker. So the word immediately preceding は is the topic of the sentence (possibly the subject too), and the word preceding を is the direct object of the verb (the thing that receives the action of the verb). Aha! Yes, that suggest we have a verb. And they come at the end of the sentence, so what is after を here is probably a verb. Good, we're making headway!
Let's work out some of these words then. Firstly we have 今回、which is probably one word followed by a comma. One word, probably a noun (no okurigana), with two characters. So we probably want to use the ON readings of the characters. Lets look them up: 今 has 4 strokes. So we look down the list of 4 stroke characters in the back of our book until we find it, and turn to the entry. We see the ON readings are either KON or KIN. Next look up 回 (6 strokes), ON reading: KAI. So grab your word dictionary, and lets have a look at KONKAI. Found it? Yeah, it means "this time". Sweet. Make a note.
今回 = KONKAI = this time
Next, 私 (7 strokes). Just the one kanji, so lets reckon it is the kun reading. Look it up: watashi. Word dictionary tells us that means "I"/"myself"--you'll start to recognise this character really quickly.
私 = watashi = I
Next we have a kanji with okurigana. This means that it isn't in a compound noun, as such, so we are probably looking at the kun reading. So lets look up this kanji: 焼 (12 strokes), and we see that it is read ya. Therefore 焼き is read yaki. Looking this up we see this is a prefix for "cooked by grilling". Ah, so next should be something you can cook by grilling.
鳥 (11 strokes), again kun reading: tori. This is "bird". "Grilled bird"? That doesn't sound right. Lets look up yakitori then, see if that comes up. Oh yes, "small pieces of chicken grilled on bamboo skewers". Now that sounds tasty.
焼き鳥 = yakitori = chicken shish kebab (effectively), but we'll call it by it's name, yakitori.
So, we come to the last word. 食べた. We have a kanji and okurigana. We already know it is probably a verb, so we definitely want to use the kun reading. 食 (9 strokes) ta. So this is read tabeta. But wait, this is a verb and it doesn't end with a syllable from the 'u' row (eg る [ru], す [su], う [u] etc). That means it has been conjugated, but we need to un-conjugate it to look it up (the character book often gives common verbs for a kanji in plain form, as it does in this case, but we'll go through it anyway.)
So, lets reference a conjugation table to see where we stand. You might not need to; quickly you will pick up that a verb ending in た (ta) is in the plain-past form.
So how to un-conjugate? There are two groups of verbs, godan (group 1) and ichidan (group 2), that conjugate differently. ichidan is the simplest, the final る (ru) is replaced with た to make the plain past. So to un-conjugate we can just change た to る, giving us taberu to look up. Now, it might not be an ichidan verb, but it was quick, and if we don't find it we know we need try again. But, happily we do find it: "to eat", so the plain-past, of course, is "ate".
Note: To un-conjugate a godan verb, look it up in a conjugation table. This may give you three different options, and you have to look up each to see which is right.
食べた = tabeta = ate
So we can put it all together now:
今回、私は焼き鳥を食べた。
konkai, watashi wa yakitori wo tabeta.
Regarding me this time: (I) ate/had yakitori.
"This time I had yakitori."

And people say Japanese is difficult! LOL. Once you get used to it, its OK. And of course, the more you do it, the less you will have to look stuff up!
Well I hope that gave you a little help with getting along with kanji. And did you notice? No horrid lists of kanji to memorise! Super^^

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Reviews of Learning Materials

So many books, so little time! Here's what I think of what I have ...

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Reviews of Learning Materials

So many books, so little time! Here's what I think of what I have...

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Beginner's Japanese Script

by Helen Gilhooly

This is the first book I bought on Japanese, to see if I would like it.
Beginner's Japanese Script is excellent. It gives an overview of the language in general and also introduces the three writing systems, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. It teaches some basic kanji, and by the end of the book has you reading some simple Japanese.
I found it to be an excellent start as going straight into the writing systems means you can avoid romaji later, and have a more powerful Japanese learning experience. By the way, don't panic about there being three writing systems. Hiragana and katakana are dead easy.
I found this book to be a good and essential introduction, although insufficient to fully learn hiragana and katakana (and obviously it's only a bit of an introduction to kanji...)

Let's Learn Hiragana

by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura

Hiragana is the "basic" Japanese writing system. It is used to write words whenever kanji isn't used, and for grammatical functions.
This book is an excellent course in learning hiragana. It introduces the 46 characters incrementally, and gives exercises to help cement them in your mind. If you have already had the introduction of Beginner's Japanese Script you will be up and running with hiragana within a week or two using this book!

Let's Learn Katakana

by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura

Katakana is very similar to hiragana. It is commonly used to write foreign names and loan-words. It is also often used for writing animal and botanical names, for onomatopoeic expressions (notably manga sound effects), and for domestic telegrams.
This book is similar in format to Let's Learn Hiragana, and is an essential partner to it!

Let's Learn Kanji

by Joyce Yumi Mitamura and Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura

Let's Learn Kanji aims to teach kanji by introducing their building blocks, 'radicals', which are often adapted versions of simple kanji. This is a much more challenging affair than Let's Learn Hiragana and Let's Learn Katakana. The approach of this book is well structured, and for a dedicated person with a reasonable existing vocabulary, I can see it being very useful. For me, I prefer to pick up kanji as I go, so I found it hard work, and lost interest. There are essential things to learn from this book though.

Take off in Japanese

by Lynne Strugnell

As you would expect from OUP, this is quality learning material. It consists of a book and four CDs. The teaching takes an active approach where you learn by trying to interpret and answer questions about spoken scenarios. The eternal problem with these type of things is that they get boring fast, because the situations are necessarily artificial. I got half way through before I felt I needed to move on to more genuine language. What I did learn from it, I learnt well though.
This gives Japanese in romaji. It would be better in kana. I would say this is not essential.

Japanese the Manga Way

by Wayne P. Lammers

This book is amazing! 100% essential!!
Japanese the Manga Way covers all grammar and sentence structure right up to intermediate level. Its tagline is "real manga, real Japanese", and it delivers. Everything it teaches is illustrated with one or more excerpts from a manga comic. Clear explanations link to clear illustrations. You can't ask for more!
I am privileged in that I get to actively correspond with a Japanese friend, and without this book I would not be able to participate anywhere near as much in our immensely educational exchanges in Japanese; it allows me to try and say what I want to say, rather than being limited to just the things I have learnt to say.
If you are serious about Japanese, you have to buy this book!

Tell Me More Japanese

by Auralog

When it comes to computer software, there are only two real options, this and the Rosetta Stone series. I bought Tell Me More Japanese because at the time it was £90, where RS was over £200. It also has voice recognition, which at the time, RS did not (it does now though). I have recently started using my copy of TMMJ, and I have thoroughly tried the demo of RS.

Well, I think that learning grammar from some of the above books is best, but computer software is really powerful for learning vocabulary in an interesting way. So, I would say that a computer package isn't the first stop for a beginner, but once you have a good grounding in grammar, you should be able to stay with the software without too much trouble. Also, being comfortable with kanji will give you an advantage, because you can learn the kanji with the words.
Both packages give romaji, kana, and kanji transcriptions, and you can select which you want displayed (you might need to download the latest version of TMMJ to get the kana transcriptions [see below])

The RS approach is to give pictures with words linked to them. You both hear and read the word, depending on the exercise, and you have to select the correct picture, or the correct word etc. After the exercises are done, you can do them all again as a scored test. It guides you well, and you never feel lost. It is hugely repetitive though, and I can see it easily getting boring. There is also a speech recognition pronunciation section, but I found that it didn't really work at all. It was much too fine-tuned for my system. Even trying it on the British English demo, I couldn't get it to recognise hardly anything.

TMMJ takes a much different approach, and I didn't like it at first, but I'm getting on with it much better now. You start with a dialogue, where a speaker says something, and you are presented with two options to reply with. Using the built in voice recognition, you simply say it, and it detects which answer you gave. Pretty clever! And it works! (most of the time...when it doesn't work it is so frustrating!). When I tried this back when I was a novice at Japanese, I found it utterly impossible to keep up with. However, now I know a fair amount of grammar, and am well versed in how Japanese is pronounced, it is a much more pleasurable process. You can get translations of individual words by holding the mouse over a word, and you can toggle on and off the full translation. You can also link directly through to the pronunciation section to practice pronouncing a word, and simply click back to pick up where you left off.
Once you understand what the speaker says, what the options for response are, and you are confident you can pronounce your response, you speak, at which point the software will interactively react with a response, and move on. The idea is to exhaust all of the paths through the dialogue by doing it multiple times.
Next is the pronunciation section. You can practice individual syllables, words, and whole sentences. The voice recognition grades you against a "model" response, and you can select the level of difficulty in the options. Naturally, this doesn't work perfectly. Some words it refuses to recognise no matter how hard you try. But, for me it is far superior to the RS voice recognition, and being able to tune the difficulty means you can select the level you need it at, and at least be able to get on with it.
Finally we have the exercises, which are a number of tasks and puzzles. Initially I approached these as an 'exam' wanting to get a perfect score, but the dialogue doesn't introduce all of the vocabulary, so it is better to look upon these as games, where you see what you can do even if you don't know. There are various tasks such as linking related words, arranging sentences, taking down dictation, and completing crossword puzzles etc.
You can look up grammar and words in the reference section (J to E only), and you can check your progress through the lesson in the Lesson Report section. There are six lessons on the first CD--presumably a similar amount on the others too.
TMMJ gives you the freedom to explore as you choose, but initially at least, there sometimes isn't enough guidance.

So initially I though RS was better, but I am glad I persevered with TMMJ, because now I really like it, and I think it may, in the long term, be more interesting than RS. But it doesn't work on Vista!
Getting TMMJ to run on Vista:
The only way I have been able to get TMMJ to work on Vista is to run it in XP. Ha, sounds odd? It is easy with Microsoft Virtual PC. This is a free piece of software you can download. It isn't supposed to work on Vista Home Premium, but it works for me.
Once you have downloaded it, you need to make sure you have space on your HDD for about 5GB. You start up MVPC and create a 'virtual hard drive' which is simply a file, and specify how much RAM you want to give over to XP. Then you run the virtual machine, and install XP from your old XP disk, like you would on a real computer. Once that is done, simply install TMMJ, and you're away!
There is a handy option to only allow local network traffic to the virtual PC. That is a good idea, so you don't need to install virus protection etc..
For a full walk through on how to run a virtual PC, see here. And to get the latest version of TMMJ see the support pages, but you can ftp directly to ftp://club.auralog.com/hotline/Tell_me_More_5_chinese_japanese/ and download what you need (check the 'install' directory). For wanna-be pirates, you can't do anything at all with the software without copies of the language discs, sorry.

Dictionaries:

Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary

edited by Jonathan Bunt and Gillian Hall

I actually have the Oxford Starter Japanese Dictionary, also edited by Jonathan Bunt, which has been replaced by this version.
It is an excellent Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary, with clear grammar and usage notes. Handily it also gives the part of language (e.g. verb, noun, adjective etc) for words, which whilst not strictly necessary for Japanese (you can tell what type of word they are from the way the they are written), is very handy for the beginner.
Being a beginner's dictionary it is not fully comprehensive--I have stumped it many times--but it has a very good range. As a complement to Kodansha's Furigana Japanese-English Dictionary it is very useful.
You need to be able to read kana (but not kanji) to use this dictionary.

Kodansha's Furigana Japanese-English Dictionary

by Masatoshi Yoshida

I must have bought this when the J-E & E-J version was more expensive.
It is an excellent dictionary. Quite comprehensive (although not fully--supplement with Jim Breen's WWWJDIC). Although I've never actually read them, it's explanations for language use look quite good. I should get around to it!
The biggest plus with this dictionary is that every listing has an example or two with it, so you can get a good sense of usage. I'd really like to get the E-J version of this dictionary.
You need to be able to read kana (but not kanji) to use this dictionary.

Oxford Japanese Grammar & Verbs Dictionary

by Jonathan Bunt

This is concise grammar! This isn't a book you read for fun. No way. It's hard work. But importantly, it is clear and gets the job done. It is good for when Japanese the Manga Way fails, or for another take on a principle.
This dictionary could be organised better--it is a frustration that the particles aren't listed in gojūon order! Also furigana would be helpful, as with the numerous examples it only gives straight Japanese and romaji.

Casual Books:

Kana de Manga
Japanese Sound FX!

by Glenn Kardy

This series by Glenn Kardy is a great fun introduction to Japanese writing. In Kana de Manga each hiragana and katakana character is introduced with a Japanese word and a beautiful illustration by Chihiro Hattori, with a little paragraph of story with some extra words. Great!
These kind of teach you how to write the characters, but not nearly as well as the Let's Learn series above.
Kana de Manga: Japanese Sound FX! is a great little book that gives lots of insight into how onomatopoeia are used in manga and other things. It is by no means exhaustive, although there is a lot for such a little book. Oddly, it is has no Japanese index, so it is hard to use as a dictionary to look up encountered sound effects...

Kanji de Manga 1, 2, 3, & 4.

by Glenn Kardy

I only have Kanji de Manga 1 so far, but I like it a lot. It introduces a kanji character with the stroke order, the readings, and some example words. Then it gives a short manga segment by Chihiro Hattori, with dialogue in Japanese using the kanji character (with furigana), and a translation below. To get a full understanding, these need to be complemented with some of the more serious books above; but regardless, what fun!
Again, these don't teach how to write the characters fully. See Let's Learn Kanji for a full treatment.

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Stuff I Asked About

I am lucky enough to have a Japanese friend who helps me a lot. The following are things that I had a hard time finding or understanding using textbooks, and that I asked her about.

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Stuff I Asked About

I am lucky enough to have a Japanese friend who helps me a lot. The following are things that I had a hard time finding or understanding using textbooks, and that I asked her about.

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Of course, a huge arigatō goes to my friend for this information, and for taking the time to explain it to me!

Times of Day:
I have a book, I forget which is it, that categorically states that the Japanese use a 12 hour system of time, just like we do, where asa is equivalent to a.m., and gogo is equivalent to p.m. This, apparently, is not so.
There are more than just the two words, and this is the approximate times to which they are applied:
朝 asa: 6am - 9pm
午前 gozen: 9am - 12pm
午後 gogo: 12pm - 4pm
午後／夕方 gogo / yūgata: 4pm - 6/7pm
夜 yoru: 7pm +
This conversation actually arose because of confusion over yūgata being generally translated into English as 'evening', but only part of what is considered yūgata in Japan is considered 'evening' here.
So, asa is 'early morning', gozen is 'morning' or 'mid-morning', gogo is 'afternoon', yūgata is 'late afternoon' or 'evening' depending on the specific time, and yoru is 'night', although it also overlaps with our 'evening' (which I consider to be 5/6pm to 9-11pm).
The reason why gogo is included as a possibility with yūgata is because yūgata is quite formal, and so gogo can be used instead to be less stiff.
Also note that the time is often written with AM and PM in Japan, just as it is here, but it isn't read "ay-em" and "pee-em", it instead is read the same as if it were written with kanji--in other words, using the above words. So, 7am would be read asa shichi-ji, 10am would be gozen jū-ji, 2pm would be gogo ni-ji, 5pm would be yūgata go-ji or gogo go-ji, and 9pm would be yoru ku-ji.

～ていない (~te inai) / ～てない (~te nai):
This is about the gerund (-te form) of a verb being followed by the negative of iru, inai (or the contracted form nai).
The gerund followed by iru (or the contraction ru) can be either ongoing action ("-ing") or "has done the action", depending on the nature of the verb and the context.
It should come as no surprise then that the gerund followed by inai would be "hasn't done the action".
Now that is easy to say, but I had a hard time understanding it, because of the nature of English chronological tenses. For example, when we negate a past-test verb we can say 'has not' or 'did not'; so "He did not turn off the cooker", and "He has not turned off the cooker". The difference between these is something we instinctively feel, of course, but purely in terms of chronological-tense they are the same (both state that in the past an action did not occur).
If, however, you look at it from the point of view of Japanese completion-tense, you can see the difference right away:
"He did not turn off the cooker" = The act of turning off was negatively completed.
"He has not turned off the cooker" = The act of turning off has not been completed (and may negative or positively be completed yet).
So lets consider our tense as a party. Tanaka-san may or may not be coming, he may have arrived, or he may not:
田中さんは来ない [tanaka-san wa konai] = "Tanaka-san isn't coming." or "Tanaka-san won't come." (before or during the party--incomplete, expecting negative completion).
田中さんは来ている [tanaka-san wa kite iru] = "Tanaka-san is on his way." (during the party--ongoing action)
田中さんは来ていない [tanaka-san wa kite inai] = "Tanaka-san hasn't (yet) come." (during the party--incomplete, not expecting positive or negative completion; or "ongoing lack of action").
田中さんは来なかった [tanaka-san wa konakatta] = "Tanaka-san didn't come." (after the party--negative completion).

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