Tools and Reference Pages

Fun Tools To Add To Your Devices For Japanese!


Hey guys, this is a list of all the cool extensions, add-ons, and applications I've found to be extremely useful to help learn or support Japanese usage on my computer's web browsers, which are Google Chrome (primary) and Mozilla Firefox (Secondary), and my Kindle Fire and from the Google Play Store on my Smart Phone, which is a Samsung Galaxy S4 (but most will work on many different phones).

But first, let's start off with a few pages I have bookmarked, personally.

1) Jisho.org - The best Japanese to English dictionary on the web.  You can input in Japanese or English. You can even see example sentences.  You can look up kanji by the radicals you see in them.  This is your one-stop for any Japanese word or Kanji look up.
2) Japanese verb and adjective conjugation page - Input a verb in the dictionary (infinitive) form, and this will show you every single possible conjugation of it.  For an example, I input 'undousuru' (to exercise), simply replace that search term with your own.
3)The Ultimate page of Japanese linguistic tools - Much of this may be pretty advanced for some of you, but as we move along you will find it more and more useful.
4) Google Translate - It's no secret that google translate is generally crap, but what DOES it do for you? It provides audio of anything you input in Japanese, to give you the correct pronunciation of each word. That in and of itself is worth bookmarking it.
5) Kanji Radicals Information Page -  This page will be important for lessons in the future, because we will be learning the kanji radicals step-by-step, as we did with the hiragana and katakana.  
6)This page is part of The Kanji Alive App (no download required) which has other resources which will also prove useful when we move on to Kanji study.
7) And of course you all know how I can't sing the praises of Human Japanese's free downloads enough. I won't post it here, but if you contact me personally, I will be more than happy to tell you how I got the ENTIRE PROGRAM completely for FREE.  (Intermediate is not available yet from my sources, but the entire first program is available to torrent... ;)~ )

For Chrome Browser on my Windows 7 OS laptop


  1. Google Input Tools - This is an input method editor, or, to be more clear, this extension allows you to input Japanese on any webpage, google document, etc.,  even if you have NOT installed the language pack on your computer for some reason.   There is a video which will explain the installation step-by-step, and it takes all of 30 seconds to install and set up.  
  2. Characterizer - This extension will replace the first letter of words on any webpage with the Japanese character for that word.  So, for instance, a sentence might look like this, "Today the kids and I were at the pool and we splashed in the ζ°΄ater".  I have found it EXTREMELY useful in learning and maintaining kanji memorization skills.  Pretty soon, you will find that you recognize a ton of kanji and you've never felt like you actually had to study them!

Firefox
  1. Characterizer for Firefox - Please note that this extension is FREE.  There is the OPTION to contribute $4.99 but you can just click 'Add to Firefox' and you do NOT have to pay.  I know there was some confusion about this before.  It is FREE just ignore the things that suggest you contribute and click 'Add to Firefox'.
  2. Kitsune - Allows users to input Japanese into Firefox without the Windows IME. This does much the same thing as Google Input Tools, just with a different user interface. 

~ MORE TO COME~

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