Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin
| Message 65 of 1702 08 July 2011 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
If you’re using firefox, may I reccomend the wonderful add-on called rikaichan? It will upon hovering a kanjiword
give the appropriate reading and a defenition of said word and makes reading very much easier if kanji is a struggle
for you. There’s also many sites where you can input a URL, which then gives all kanji in the URL furigana.
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Lasciel Groupie United States Joined 5373 days ago 55 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese
| Message 66 of 1702 09 July 2011 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
Rikaichan is very useful, there's also one called Perapera-kun I use that is pretty much the same thing (except it was easier for me to get working :P)
I have some short children's picture books entirely in kana with spaces uploaded, if you're interested just PM me.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5184 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 67 of 1702 09 July 2011 at 5:03pm | IP Logged |
Hampie wrote:
If you’re using firefox, may I reccomend the wonderful add-on called rikaichan? It will upon hovering a kanjiword
give the appropriate reading and a defenition of said word and makes reading very much easier if kanji is a struggle
for you. There’s also many sites where you can input a URL, which then gives all kanji in the URL furigana. |
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I have riki and it's a great addon but I still find kanji to be a serious pain. With other languages I like that I can just look at a word and even if I don't know the meaning I can still read it to myself and know how to pronounce it. I read in Spanish but I don't know every word but I'm still reading the Spanish to myself and looking up the important words. But the fact that I can read ALL the words to myself regardless gives me a nice immersion effect. I try but I just can't achieve that immersion effect with kanji =/. Plus with japanese I never really know when one word ends and another starts. Riki seems to do a good job of guessing. It's just a big headache.
I was reading some stuff written in hiragana on the hiragana times website it and it was just so much easier and a pleasure. I don't know how much reading material they have though. I'll look for more tools to add furigana to kanji. It would be good if I could find one that i was happy with.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5184 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 68 of 1702 09 July 2011 at 5:43pm | IP Logged |
Ok. I found a couple nice addons for FireFox - Furigana Inserter and HTML Ruby. I had Riki already but with this Furigana addon it's far more useful. This add on puts spaces in the text along with furigana (I can even use Romaji if I wanted). It actually works.
Some pages look better than others. Yahoo Japan looks good although in the middle there's a bunch of links and the links seem to be harder for it to format. But the majority of what it displays looks great. And most importantly it displays this short story beautifully - http://www005.upp.so-net.ne.jp/kareha/trans/norwood.htm
I'm thinking of scanning Harry Potter into my computer to read now heh. I'll probably read some other stuff to improve my Japanese more though before I bother. This is pretty cool.
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Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin
| Message 69 of 1702 12 July 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged |
On the other hand, ig you have a vague knowlege of the kanji used in a word you can guess their meaning although
you cannot pronounce them — this is something you cannot do in say Spannish or Zwahili.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5184 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 70 of 1702 12 July 2011 at 5:32am | IP Logged |
Grabbed another shiny app on the appstore for ipad/pod. This one is for learning Kanji. It's called KanjiBox. It seems kind of neat. The study method I'm using on it right now is a multiple choice game. I haven't explored all the other options. Weirdly enough it has an option to "play" against other opponents online. Very strange. When my kanji gets better I am going to try that out.
So my new method to learning kanji is to just focus on the meanings of each individual kanji (IE English). I still review the sounds/japanese for the kanji but I give myself a "correct" response if I know the English meaning. It makes it easier and I think it'll make learning kanji more fun. I will work on the kanji sounds later.
As for vocabulary, I found out that my flashcard app FlashCards Deluxe has neat feature - you can combine text to speech with the slide show mode to have it read off words/definitions to you. I'm finding this is great when I'm doing something like riding my bicycle. Especially on weekends when I have the energy for it i like to go on long 35+ mile rides and listening to the vocab is surprisingly a good way to study while i bike. I thought it might get super boring and dry but it's not bad at all. I'm trying to work this into other activities. Repetition = more Japanese getting into my long term memory.
Katakana is getting better. I had wanted to study my katakana flashcard set every day until I learned it solid but I haven't had the discipline. However - I am doing it a few times a week so it's still getting slowly better. Still not up to my Hirigana but I'm starting to feel pretty confident whereas a week ago even I would kind of throw in the towel when reading something and it wasn't hiragana.
Current anime series I'm watching is Noein. I basically let netflix recommend my next anime and then I go find it online to watch it. Stupid netflix streaming versions of movies has English dubbed for the most part. Thanksfully not all. If Inuyasha hadn't been in original Japanese I may never have decided to try to learn this language.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5982 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 71 of 1702 17 July 2011 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
I didn't realise you had joined the TAC Team あ so I am just dropping by to say a belated "hello".
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5184 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 72 of 1702 19 July 2011 at 8:42am | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
I didn't realise you had joined the TAC Team あ so I am just dropping by to say a belated "hello". |
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ah hello. yeah i need to read up on that and see what guidelines I need to follow for that.
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