“goo dictionary” is a free dictionary service launched in 1999 by goo, a portal site operated by NTT DoCoMo.

The service offered Japanese language dictionaries, English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, thesaurus dictionaries, four-character idioms, kanji dictionaries, and terminology dictionaries from Shogakukan, Sanseido, Gakken, and other language dictionaries and terminology collections.

Goo announced this service will end by 25th June, after 26 years.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43232519

I had a couple of issues of this 3 decades ago (I think Tower Records in the UK sometimes had it).

A magazine for English-speaking learners of Japanese, using snippets from manga popular in Japan (not just the usual suspects known abroad). Explaining vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, writing systems, culture, politics, history and more, in a fun and memorable way.

The full run from 1990 to 1997 has been uploaded by Mangajin, Inc. to the Internet Archive.

Collection on Archive.org

• https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Mangajin%2C+Inc.%22

Wikipedia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin

Found via Language Log

• https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68979

Editor's note from Volume #1, June 1990

The MANGAJIN project has been brewing for quite some time now, but when the Japanese language “boom” started around the end of the 80's, we decided that the time was right to put the plan into action. In order to develop the concept, we talked to a lot of people and did as much research as we could, but it was impossible to do any real quantitative research. Now that MANGAJIN has been launched, we hope to use it as a research instrument to find out more about what type of material you want to see in this publication.

When we select material for publication in MANGAJIN, we consider suitability for language study — we look for a representative mix of slang and polite speech forms, and for sentence structures likely to be useful. We try to pick material which, although “comic” in nature, reflects popular Japanese culture and values, The final criterion, however, is whether the story has entertainment value.

Because so many people seem to be interested in Japanese for business reasons, we selected a business-related story (Hotel, by Shotaro Ishinomori) as our feature manga for this issue, but we're open to suggestions for future issues. There is certainly plenty to choose from in the world of manga—it's estimated that comic books and magazines accounted for more than 30% of all books and magazines published in Japan in 1988. Let us know what you'd like to see.

Although preferences vary, most people agree that manga are one of the few ways that students of Japanese can access “real” colloquial Japanese and get a glimpse of contemporary Japanese pop culture. Because we provide the readings for the Japanese text in English letters, along with translations and notes, you won't have to spend so much time flipping through the kanji dictionary that you lose interest in the story.

1 hope you find your own method of using and enjoying MANGAJIN, and please let us hear from you.

This article was making the rounds last year, but I don't think I've seen it posted here - and it seems like a good fit.

It talks about how disconnected the Japanese writing and speaking systems can be, and how that can create some affordances. I found it interesting, at least.

I've been learning Chinese for quite some time now, and will probably keep at it these coming years as it'll be a necessity in my life, but I'd lie if I'm not constantly attracted by Japanese. I'm just afraid of picking up another life-long project, and having to balance learning Japanese with keeping up my Chinese. Has anyone learnt Japanese after Chinese? What has been your experience? Did knowing hanzi help with learning kanji?

I figured a meme for folks learning Japanese could be fun :)

MONO NO AWARE - Kamukamo-Shikamo-Nidomokamo!!

MONO NO AWARE - かむかもしかもにどもかも！

Hi. I'm a big YouTube guy. I spend a ton of time watching YouTube videos. But for the life of me, I can't seem to enjoy Japanese YouTube. I do enjoy watching SOME vtubers occasionally when they play fun games. Other than that I don't really read much unless it's on reddit/lemmy or github. Someone pointed me to a Japanese mastodon instance but it has a pretty intense VPN block.

What do you guys watch/read in Japanese?

i finally went over and gave up the romanji completely, it really does make my lessons so much easier that i have to kick myself for not just sitting there and putting more time into learning the characters sooner, but now i find myself really thirsting for the kanji study that i was always putting off

i remember being recommended a website, i don't think that they had an app at the time, but it actually went through and pointed out connections in the pictogram aspect of the kanji to build off of which made things a lot more interactive and memorable for me than some of the apps that i've been trying out recently that all seem pretty "memorize these flashcards" and i sit there feeling like dennis on that family feud ep of always sunny and it's like, they're stealing my thirst and i just want to feel good learning kanji again like i did that time, does anyone know what site i'm talking about? or any apps that actually try and teach you before just endlessly quizzing you?

ty in advance for sharing your knowledge, or if there is another community that you'd recommend that i crosspost, feel welcome in sharing, ty

I stopped learning Japanese in a classroom about three years ago, with passing N4 being my biggest achievement. Since then, I've been occasionally doing my Anki reviews and trying to read and listen from time to time.

As a molecular biologist, I was thrilled to find a couple of great thematic podcasts: Researchat.fm and 研エンの仲. A game-changer for me, though, was Nihongo Con Teppei, which I could actually understand.

The problem with the first two podcasts, which are not designed for Japanese learners in any way, is that while I’ve started to pick up some nouns and phrases over time, I can almost never, for the life of me, grasp the meaning of entire sentences. I can tell they’re discussing a specific topic, but the overall gist almost always eludes me.

Does anyone have advice on how to improve comprehension? I feel like verbs are the trickiest part to understand...

Last year: https://bookwormstory.social/post/279316

maybe it's another Duolingo bullshit they push upon us or maybe a typical thing in Japanese? namely in phrases like けんさんは二年生ですか it could mean both "Is Ken a second year student?" and (according to duolingo) "are you a ~~second year student~~sophomore, Ken?" how do i know if it's directly addressing the person? which is which?

So for 2-3 years I have been using flash cards to get to 1000 kanji and then switch for full immersion and extrapolate meaning with some dictionary. I only know around 150 kanji.

This method already worked for english and russian but without flash cards part. I learned first 1000 words + grammar in school by osmosis thorough textbooks.

My routine is 30 min a day for two weeks and then 2 week break due to boredom or some other factor. It makes my backlog huge and discouraging and my retention seems terrible (60-70%)

For the past 6 month I didn't make any new flashcards to remember. only reviews of old ones.

Do y'all have some better method to get to 1000 kanji inefficiently? Because it seems efficient method doesn't work for me.

Like "radio" or "fantasy" or "game..." They're basically the same in Japanese (radjio, fantaji, gaamu) so if I just said them in English pronunciation, would someone with no experience in English still be able to tell what I'm saying?

Hi, I use Rikaichan/Rikaikun at the moment but I'm not sure how to turn on pitch accent if it has it. Does anyone use a pop-up dictionary that has pitch accent, by any chance?

相席（あいせき,） means "sharing a table with someone you don't know (e.g. at a restaurant)" (Takoboto).

What other fun words have you all encountered that just don't translate well to English or require a short explanation?

I'd like to make a sentence that's very long in translation, and/or read a silly sentence like that.

({凸|のの})

{Testing, 1 2 3|Look I made a face!}, I just want to try this in a post.

I am designing a tshirt with a friend and we wanted to put some japanese on it. Since my japanese is extremely basic (こんにちは、ミカです) I wanted to ask whether the symbols DeepL gave us mean what we think it means. We want to have a skeleton inside a water bottle and the text should read "stay hydrated" and we got these symbols: 水分補給. Do they work in that context? Or are there any better suggestions we could use? Thanks in advance!

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/11661821

"〇〇だったば、...." is this legitimate?

I want to say "If it was 〇〇, then... ", is "〇〇だったば、..." the right clause?