kawaii!!!

Like I had mentioned before I’m once again in a quest to learn Japanese, but this time its for real, I promise   Anyway I’ve been looking at the different resources and methods to train oneself in Japanese and found a couple of Firefox add-ons that can help you learn Japanese while surfing the net. These are the one’s I thought would be the most helpful but by no means its an exhaustive list. To see more options visit the Mozilla add-ons page.

1. Furigana Injector: “Looks up the readings for kanji words and inserts them as furigana.”
2. Kanji-li: “What the program does is simple. It replaces the first letter of a word with a kanji of similar meaning. For example, the word read might appear as 読ead.” Unfortunately this add-on is only available for older versions of Firefox.
3. FetchImi: “FetchImi is an English to Japanese pop-up translator. Read English web sites with pop-up translations just by moving the cursor over the word you want to lookup. ” This add-on is till “experimental”.
4. Ubiquity: Ubiquity is wonderful “do it all” tool for Firefox. It comes with a translation command that can be very handy.

This add-ons are definitely helpful for intermediate and advanced Japanese students but not so much for beginners like me.

According to Microsoft: Internet Explorer 8 vs Mozilla Firefox vs Google Chrome

It may seem that Microsoft is scared of losing even more market share to Firefox and Chrome. They have resorted to blatant lies; and dirt trowing at the competition. A good product should be able to stand on it’s own, just like a good politician should talk about his plans, achievements and ideals for making life better instead of spending all his time and effort attacking and criticizing his competitors.

However it’s good to know Microsoft has some new ads that talk about the ‘awesomeness’ of it’s web browsing application, look at them and share your thoughts! I’ll share my favorite MS ad so far first, it’s about Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing or as we like to call it porn mode:

Click here to view the embedded video.

S.H.Y.N.E.S.S. (Sharing Accelerators):

Click here to view the embedded video.

F.O.M.S. (Web Slices)

Click here to view the embedded video.

G.R.I.P.E.S. (Speed improvements)

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Mozilla community has announced the immediate availability of Firefox 3.5 codenamed “Shiretoko”. This browser is jam packed with new features and improvements. Also there are some new exciting addons from Mozilla labs like Mozilla Weave and Mozilla Jet Pack. Although Firefox is no longer the fastest kid in the block it is still pretty fast and it still knows no peer when it comes to functionality, innovation and privacy. Enjoy!

Get Firefox 3.5 now!