(Note: this list is primarily about Japanese study resources, but near the bottom I’ve added some entries that are related to Japan or sites that I frequent.)
- Japandev: a neat search engine for finding tech jobs in Japan.
- Kanshudo: An awesome site that helps with reading practice, learning kanji, and other things. Has many texts of different levels to read, and good content even for non-paying users.
- Japanoscope: A cool site with a lot of free Japanese reading practice with parallel translations.
- Landofnu.com: An informative site with detailed explanations of 4-letter kanji compounds, with a comic twist.
- Manga Sensei: A great resource including grammar notes for various levels and podcasts with some cool guests.
- Shosetsu.ninja: A great site that reviews Japanese literature and has a few short translations as well.
- BFF Tokyo: A relatively new site that already has some good content for learning Japanese. It also has a section on finding jobs in Tokyo.
- ReadNihon: [This site has been closed down]
- Dictionary Goo: My favorite Japanese dictionary.
- Japanese Stack Exchange: A great place to have difficult Japanese questions answered, especially grammar related.
- Reddit Learn Japanese: A good place to ask questions about Japanese and learn about resources.
- Oshiete Goo: Knowledge sharing site (Japanese only). Great place to see polite, intellectual Japanese.
- Novel Updates: Translated works in various languages, including Japanese.
- Gogen Guide: Great site about Japanese word origins (Japanese only).
- Shousetsuka ni narou: Site which has many Japanese short stories and novels posted by native speakers.
- Kakuyomu: A site similar to ‘Shousetsuka ni narou’, but with much nicer visual design. (review)
- Kinokuniya: A great Japanese bookstore with several physical stores in the US
- Booklive: A great Japanese Ebook site (review).
- Amazon Japan: The Japanese version of the popular bookseller.
- Tuttle Publishing: A publisher that has many good books about Japanese culture and language.
- Gengo: Web-based human translation platform. A good place to get your feet wet with translation (my series of articles about Gengo)
- Niconico (formerly Nico Nico Douga): a Japanese video sharing website.
- JDorama: A comprehensive site about Japanese dramas and their actors.
- CrunchyRoll: Great streaming media site including many Japanese anime and dramas.
- Japanese Language Meetup: a site to help find Japanese study groups around the world.
- NHK Radio Podcast: a set of good podcasts from the major Japanese media company
- Naver Matome: Japanese news collection site (review)
- Slashdot Japan: News for nerds in Japanese.
- Japanese accent dictionary: A good site about intonation patterns for common words.
- ProZ: A website with information about translation jobs, tools, and related knowledge.
- Arigatai Books: up and coming publisher of Japanese literature and educational books (Note: owned and managed by the same person who does this site):
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Since my comment on the 2nd chapter of Final Days (I commented as Myst), I’ve been looking around your site a bit. I was considering learning Japanese, but was a bit lost as to where to start, so this resources page looks like it’ll be especially helpful. Thank you for this, plus all the other language-study related pages!
I’d like to ask a question, if that’s okay? I don’t really have the time or the money to learn Japanese from a professional, so I was wondering whether self-study is a viable option. My intentions are purely leisure-oriented, so it’s not like I’m aiming for pro-level knowledge: just enough to be able to understand manga, novels, movies, etc. Is that achievable with self-learning? Or do you think it’d be a waste of time? If it is possible, where should I start: spoken, written, or should they go together?
I hope it was okay to ask this here. If not, sorry!
Hey TreePeony, thanks for the comment.
I’m glad to hear you are interesting in learning Japanese on your own. Of course I think it’s a viable option, it is been one of my main hobbies for many years now, and one of the main purposes of this site is to help you out on that journey.
I don’t have too much time now, but to start off with I would just buy a nice text book, and start going through it at a comfortable pace. As you have questions you can ask me any time.
You can look around, but I heard ‘Genki’ is pretty good.
Also, check out other articles on my site. You can see they are organized by keywords on the bottom of the page.
Thanks for the reply! I’ll take a look at Genki, then. And, of course, the articles here.
And thank you for the encouragement! Everyone else I heard from who learned Japanese either did it as part of their coursework or were living/working in Japan, so I was growing a bit disheartened.
Hello, I’m Japanese living in Tokyo and interested in foreign language.
I think this list is great. Since I’ve been struggling learning English, you seem so easy to learn Japanese, that is great.
Please keep learning Japanese and I’ll visit this blog again for my English learning.
Thanks for the post. Japanese wasn’t really easy for me to learn, it took a lot of hard work over around 20 years (: But I think you can learn English in much shorter time if you try. Good luck!
If you have any English questions let me know.
Beautiful list. Now I got to dive in! Thanks for the awesome compilation!
Thanks, glad it was helpful for you!
Hey, I don’t know if you check this website anymore because you haven’t updated the copyright but I just wanted to say I stumbled across this website while trying to figure out what からの meant and found a useful answer with a great description and actually explained what it meant and why. I’ve been learning Japanese for about 7 months now and hadn’t been able to find a site that had lots of great suggestions and grammar help like yours does. with how much work was clearly put into this website and the detail you go into this website deserves way more than the few visits it has, I will most definitely share this with other people I know are learning Japanese. Thank you for your free services you have provided.
Thank you for the information about the Japanese Study Resource List. This is very useful for our friends in Indonesia.
it turns out that there are a lot of Japanese Study Resource Lists. Complete information, very useful for those who want to study in Japan