[OT] Learning Japanese

Inspired to learn to read Japanese due to a lot of information on Ruby being
in Japanese, I bought a book recently (Read Japanese Today). Its a great
book, introducing the origin of the pictographs and how they relate to the
current ones.

Anyway, I wanted to know if there were good web sites for learning Japanese.
Specifically reading it. A comprehensive list of pictographs, their
meanings etc. Maybe also a place where you can convert the pictograph to
English and back?

TIA,

John.

(I decided to ask this here in case other people in this group had a similar
desire).

John graced us by uttering:

Anyway, I wanted to know if there were good web sites for learning
Japanese. Specifically reading it. A comprehensive list of
pictographs, their meanings etc. Maybe also a place where you can
convert the pictograph to English and back?

I found this site helpful:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/

It doesn’t gloss over the kana scripts, and discusses the grammar and
sentence structure, rather than just teaching you phrases. I also
really appreciate the depth with which it discusses the finer points of
Japanese grammar such as what the author calls “emotion markers” (eg:
yo, ne, na, et al.)

There is also a message board for specific questions:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?list=1-30

NB: In some areas, Japanese is astoundingly simple compared to English
and some Romance languages, but there’s still plenty to learn and
comprehend. =)

(I decided to ask this here in case other people in this group had a
similar desire).

Not bad thinking. =)

Enjoy!
Tim Hammerquist

···


That should probably be written:
no !@#$%^&*:@!semicolon
– Larry Wall in 199710161841.LAA13208@wall.org

“John” nojgoalbyspam@hotmail.com wrote in message
news:bci_8.5961$Qk6.569@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net

Inspired to learn to read Japanese due to a lot of information on Ruby
being
in Japanese, I bought a book recently (Read Japanese Today). Its a great
book, introducing the origin of the pictographs and how they relate to the
current ones.

Anyway, I wanted to know if there were good web sites for learning
Japanese.
Specifically reading it. A comprehensive list of pictographs, their
meanings etc. Maybe also a place where you can convert the pictograph to
English and back?

TIA,

John.

(I decided to ask this here in case other people in this group had a
similar
desire).

I started to learn Japanese before I found out about Ruby. I actually am
reading a really good book called “Master the Basics: Japanese” it takes you
through basically the whole language structure. It explains some english
basics behind it so it can make things easier by linking English concepts
the the equivalent concepts in Japanese. They also publish one for Spanish,
French, German, Russian, Italian, etc.

-John

You can learn a lot by reading existing (Ruby related) websites with pop up
hints added, try:

http://www.jisyo.org

For a quick introduction to the language try the Rosetta Stone demo at:

http://www.rosettastone.com/online/index2.html

Cheers,

Erik.

I hope the following pointer will help.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html

···

At Sun, 21 Jul 2002 04:02:16 +0900, John wrote:

Anyway, I wanted to know if there were good web sites for learning Japanese.
Specifically reading it. A comprehensive list of pictographs, their
meanings etc. Maybe also a place where you can convert the pictograph to
English and back?


Regards,
Aki

Name: 立川(森)察理 Akimichi Tatsukawa
Email: akimichi@mbox.co.jp
Web: http://akimichi.homeunix.net/~emile/

“John” nojgoalbyspam@hotmail.com wrote in message
news:bci_8.5961$Qk6.569@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net

Inspired to learn to read Japanese due to a lot of information on Ruby
being
in Japanese, I bought a book recently (Read Japanese Today). Its a great
book, introducing the origin of the pictographs and how they relate to the
current ones.

Anyway, I wanted to know if there were good web sites for learning
Japanese.
Specifically reading it. A comprehensive list of pictographs, their
meanings etc. Maybe also a place where you can convert the pictograph to
English and back?

TIA,

John.

(I decided to ask this here in case other people in this group had a
similar
desire).

Thankyou very much to everyone that replied.

John.

(I decided to ask this here in case other people in this group had a
similar desire).

Not bad thinking. =)

On a similar note, does anyone have a reference to getting X terminals to
display Japanese characters? I’ve not had much luck in this field. A
simple overview of the problems and solutions would rock. There are some
Ruby programs that have notes written in Japanese and I’d very much like
to read them. :slight_smile:

I’m on Debian.

As for online resources, I don’t really know of any. I’ve always relied on
actual books and courses. Occasionally, I’d write a vocabulary drill for
myself in romanji (and soon in real Japanese characters I hope).

Leon

Erik Terpstra erik@solidcode.net writes:

You can learn a lot by reading existing (Ruby related) websites with pop up
hints added, try:

http://www.jisyo.org

This is really cool. I started to learn Japanese a couple years
back, but I’ve since been slacking (after leaving college). Having
this kind of resource, especially for reading technical information
(as is often found on the web) is very handy.

Thanks for posting!

···


Josh Huber

Almost all basic tools to read/write Japanese are included in
task-japanese' package. In the dependency list, you would find also kterm’, a very populer xterm-like multilingual terminal emulator in
Japan. http://packages.debian.org/stable/misc/task-japanese.html

And afaik many Japanese rubyist use a web browser `w3m’ on terminal
emulators. w3m can render tables, frames and images on kterm.
http://packages.debian.org/stable/web/w3mmee-img.html

I often use like

% rd2 cgi.rb | w3m

to read RD document in a Ruby script, then type v on w3m to switch
HTML source/formatted views.

– Gotoken

···

At Sun, 21 Jul 2002 19:31:39 +0900, Leon Torres wrote:

On a similar note, does anyone have a reference to getting X terminals to
display Japanese characters? I’ve not had much luck in this field. A
simple overview of the problems and solutions would rock. There are some
Ruby programs that have notes written in Japanese and I’d very much like
to read them. :slight_smile:

I’m on Debian.

Hmm… my machine routinely displays Japanese characters in the
browser, email, etc. Unfortunately, I don’t know if they’re the right
ones, but I see them.

I’m using RedHat 7.3 and KDE 3.01.

···

On Sunday 21 July 2002 03:31 am, Leon Torres wrote:

On a similar note, does anyone have a reference to getting X
terminals to display Japanese characters? I’ve not had much luck in
this field. A simple overview of the problems and solutions would
rock. There are some Ruby programs that have notes written in
Japanese and I’d very much like to read them. :slight_smile:


Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE

Leon Torres graced us by uttering:

[ snip ]

On a similar note, does anyone have a reference to getting X terminals
to display Japanese characters? I’ve not had much luck in this field.
A simple overview of the problems and solutions would rock. There are
some Ruby programs that have notes written in Japanese and I’d very
much like to read them. :slight_smile:

I’m on Debian.

On SuSE 7.3 with a custom build of both the latest Eterm and w3m,
Japanese kana and kanji are displayed just fine. It just depends on the
encoding of the characters and the availability of fonts.

…of course, I moved to SuSE from Mandrake because Mandrake’s int’l
support was so often broken…

No experience with Debian.

Tim Hammerquist

···


I might be able to shoehorn a reference count in on top of the numeric
value by disallowing multiple references on scalars with a numeric value,
but it wouldn’t be as clean. I do occasionally worry about that. --lwall

You can learn a lot by reading existing (Ruby related) websites with pop up
hints added, try:

http://www.jisyo.org

This is really cool. I started to learn Japanese a couple years
back, but I’ve since been slacking (after leaving college). Having
this kind of resource, especially for reading technical information
(as is often found on the web) is very handy.

Thanks for posting!

You’re welcome, sometimes I wonder why it isn’t more well known, the
concept works really well.

Another thing you could do with this concept is adding pop up hints to
english web sites, where each word in the page is looked up in
http://www.everything2.com or http://www.gnupedia.org or
http://www.dictionary.com.

Oh well, I need more hours in a day :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Erik.