Today I'm going to share a useful software from the internet to learn the Japanese language. Yes, I know some of you Japanese-wanna-be who often watch anime or Japanese drama (better known as J-Dorama), usually stumble upon words or idioms or phrases in Japanese that you might not understand. I know. And now I'd like to introduce you to WAKAN (和漢). WAKAN is a Japanese-English dictionary which I found useful for Japanese enthusiasts. The interface is so simple. You just type in the word in English (or Japanese) to know its meaning in Japanese (or English). Simple!
Plus, this software doesn't only available in English. You can switch to either German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish and others. The download is simple and it runs perfectly on my Windows 7. Another thing that I found interesting with WAKAN is that it also contains translation to Chinese language. Same steps. Just key in the word in pin-yin. There's only one thing that might bother you. The software was last updated on 2003!! I know some of you might think it's unreliable or something. But trust me. I've been using it since the last 2 years and up until now, I found it very2 useful. As a student in one of the universities in Japan, I still rely on it to search for words that is so unfamiliar to me.
Oh yes, you can also learn the basic kanji (Chinese/Japanese characters) from this tools. Just put the cursor on the words you've searched, a pop-up will appear and the character (kanji) will appear bigger. A little basic on how to write kanji. The rules I learned to write a kanji character is "left to right, up to down". For example, how do you draw a square. You start it from top-left and draw a line to the right. Then you continue with a line straight downward. Now, to complete the square (following kanji writing rule), you can either head back to the top-left edge and draw a line downward followed by a straight line to the right to complete the square OR, you could start the horizontal line first, followed by a straight line downward (left side). Got the picture?You can start download it (if you're intersted, and if you like free stuff), visit this website:
http://wakan.manga.cz/?page=download&lang=en
oohh..oohh nearly forgot. You have to learn the basic characters of Japanese starting with "a(あ)" and end with"n(ん)". Japanese language basicly have 3 types of writings. 1:hiragana, 2:katakana (used to describe foreigners name or things which has no words in Japanese language), 3:kanji (copied from Chinese, but not all is similar).
i do read japanese magazine with the hiragana letter... its quite easy than kanji with many stroke..
ReplyDeleteWell, it is much easier with hiragana. The advantage of using kanji is that it took less space to write and you'll not get confused. Why? because there's a lot of words in Japanese with the same pronunciation, but refers to different things.
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