Useful Sites

Dictionaries

Jisho

Jisho is an extremely useful English-Japanese dictionary. You can search for words in English or Japanese and find definitions in English. Also included is Kanji lookup by radical, example Japanese sentences for context, and extensive character breakdowns with stroke order and reading compounds.

goo辞書

At nihonkarano.org, goo辞書 is our go-to online Japanese dictionary. It may be difficult to use for beginners, however intermediate learners can find simple word lookup with reasonable definitions written in Japanese so that you can understand words in context without a layer of translation.

Immersion Material

NHK News Web Easy

NHK (The Japan Broadcasting Corporation) provides NHK News Web Easy as a resource for Japanese schoolchildren to practice basic reading using real news and cultural content from a Japanese perspective written at an elementary school level. Several timely articles are posted to the site every weekday and it's great for Japanese learners who want to start reading real material and learn more about current events in Japan at the same time.

Tatoeba

Tatoeba is a sentence and translation database for multiple languages. It allows you to search for any English or Japanese word and see many real sentences that contain that word, as well as their translations, so that you can study new words in context. Here at nihonkarano.com, we use Tatoeba's sentence database for our Kanjibun tool.

Youtube

In this day and age, we live in an unprecedented time of global media availability. The truth is that you have a virtually infinite wealth of real Japanese content on any subject that interests you at your fingertips. Just search YouTube for anything that interests you using Japanese characters and more than likely you'll find more real-world immersion content than you'll be able to handle.

Lessons

Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly

The late Cure Dolly's YouTube Lessons are a huge inspiration behind this website, and their style and content should be quite familiar to anyone who has studied using our lessons as well. Her approach is similarly centered around actual Japanese grammar as opposed to English translations with a particular focus on immersion learning. The Japanese from Scratch playlist is basic but could be valuable for any level learner in terms of unlearning wacky Japanese taught by other English-lanugage resources. There are also a variety of standalone videos on other topics such as grammar points and immersion and study strategies.

IMABI 今日

IMABI 今日 is an excellent resource for grammar lessons all the way from the basic beginner to extremely advanced levels. You can follow their comprehensive lesson plan or search for individual topics in the sidebar. Highly recommended.