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.

Azumanga Daioh is definitely one of the best “slice of life” stories I’ve seen, on any medium. It’s just so funny and cool. It’s basically another high school Anime but at the same time it isn’t. There is no underlying plot where the characters need to save the world and there are no magical creatures or powers either. It just follows the daily life of a group of high school girls. Be warned that when I say this Anime is about nothing I really mean it. Also it has an all girl cast so if you don’t like that then stay away from this one. But why wouldn’t you like an all girl cast?!