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.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test Vocabulary Lists

Lists of vocabulary used for the JLPT levels 4 to 1. Various quizzes on adjectives, nouns and verbs appear for levels 4 and 3. There are also many lessons and vocbaulary flash cards to help the Japanese language learner.

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.

Introduction to Katakana

4 lessons and flashcards to get a grip on Katakanas. Well done site done at the College of Arts and College of Humanities of The Ohio State University.

Audio files help pronunciation and Quicktime application shows the brushtrokes of each katakana.

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!