Language board games and card games

You can download and print these games to learn Japanese : kanas, hiraganas, katakanas and kanji. Ateliers-alea is a new concept which publishes Japanese board games to print and play. They are now preparing card games to learn Japanese grammar, pronunciation and characters.

To use the dictionary, simply type in the word you would like to find in the box above and press the Search button. To find a Japanese definition of an English word, type in the English word. To look up a Japanese word, you must type in kana or kanji to find the definition. The dictionary is not designed to accept romanized Japanese input. You can also use wildcards ( * ) in your search.

Type in an English word and get the translations. Interesting to note that Japanese homophones are linked to a page which compares words with the same reading but different characters. Simple and easy to use.

Denshi Jisho is an easy-to-use and powerful online Japanese dictionary. It lets you find words, kanji and example sentences by searching in many ways.
The dictionaries are also interlinked so that you can check what the kanji in a word mean individually or what context a word can be used in. You can also look up kanji by the parts it contain.
The data is publicly available and comes from the excellent WWWJDIC project.

Real Kana

Hiragana and Katakana Practice

This site lets you practice learning hiragana and katakana, the two Japanese syllabaries.

It’s easy to use.  Click ‘Hiragana’ and/or ‘Katakana’ and choose which characters you’d like to practice.

Then, click ‘Practice’.  As you are presented with each character, type its rōmaji equivalent (e.g., ‘ka’).

If you get stuck, move your mouse over the character, and the answer will appear.

That’s it!

Practice Kanji by Typing Hiragana

This site lets you practice learning kanji by typing hiragana.

It’s easy to use.  Click ‘Kanji’ and choose which kanji words you’d like to practice.

Next, click ‘Practice’.  As you are presented with each word, type its rōmaji equivalent (e.g., ‘genki’).

As you type, hiragana characters will appear.  Hit ‘Enter’ to submit your guess.

If you get stuck, move your mouse over the word, and the answer will appear.

That’s it!

This is a page for learning hiragana, one of the Japanese syllabaries. You'll need Javascript to run it. (You probably have it already.)

The basic idea is to go through the deck randomly (by pressing Next card), until you can recognize all the kana.