I’m sure there’s tons and tons of neat Japanese resource websites out there, and the quickest way to find them is to find other people who know about them! I need to go through my long poorly maintained list of bookmarks and see what I’ve found over the years, but in the meantime here are two neat sites I can recommend:
Soseki Project
This is a site dedicated to the works of Natsume Soseki. Each book is broken down into chapters, and each chapter has audio, word glosses, a rough translation, and a vocab list! PDFs and MP3’s of the chapters are free to download as well! A fantastic site for those looking to broaden their classic author horizons.
Living Japanese Slang Dictionary
I just found this site myself, so haven’t had a chance to really deep-dive into it, but this is apparently the accumulated effort of the blog’s author in their quest to review and catalog as much Japanese slang as possible. Each entry lists the slang in kanji/alphabet form (for slang like NNT, for instance), the slang’s pronunciation, and the meaning and pronunciation of the slang.
There’s this cool site called learnnatively.com where you can search through a huge database of Japanese books sorted by difficulty and track your progress. I use it all the time. I’m sorry.
I don’t know if it counts as a resource, but when I am trying to find something new to read, I sometimes check the list of prize winners on Wikipedia, especially the 日本SF大賞. I also checked stuff like the このライトノベルがすごい! prize, but it turns out I’m not their target demographic, which makes most of those boring. I’m still looking for a way to consistently find interesting light novels.
So I make some pretty cool Anki decks if I say so myself haha
I haven’t updated this page in a while though so my last 3 anki decks ain’t on it yet (but it is in the folder)(Its cuz I’m planning on switching to a google sheet but I’m lazy so I haven’t moved much, lol)
On a slightly related note, It would be cool if we could share decks based on the books we’re reading, Like I know wanikani has some vocab sheets, but it would be cool if we had an ‘anki decks’ page and we’d share it from the anki-shared decks page.
Ah, that would be really nice. I’ve accumulated quite a few Anki flashcards over the years for the various media I’ve read, and while they’re not necessarily comprehensive, I’m sure someone would appreciate being spared the trouble of making them all, haha.
Throwing this one out just in case someone doesn’t know it yet: https://ichi.moe is fantastic when you stumble across a sentence where you can’t figure out what the structure is. It isn’t always 100% accurate, so take it with a grain of salt, but it has answered so many questions for me.
Babadum is a great way to practice/learn vocab. They have 5 options to play with in Japanese, but they do have other languages available! I’ve been using it since high school and I sporadically go back to play and learn new words.
this website checks your grammar, but it doesn’t tell you why it’s wrong or how to correct it. it just underlines grammar mistakes in your writing, but i do feel it is good for catching mistakes before you send that business email
Jokes aside, these three example sentence databases have saved me many times in those instances where you read a definition for a word over and over and still don’t quite get what it means in a sentence.
Hi everyone, I’ve been collecting free reading resources for a while and list them by their estimated JLPT level, e.g. here are my links for readers about N5.
I’m keeping my lists updated, so if you have more links to share I might include them there
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haha
