In a previous post, Books for Japanese Children, I talked about some of the books I have been (attempting to) read! In this article want to share some links to websites I have found and bookmarked. To be honest I haven’t used these to their full potential, but I really hope I get to them because they look like fantastic resources, which is why I wanted to share them!

きょうのイソップ童話

This one is great! It is a short story for every day of the year. There is text in Japanese and audio you can listen to while you read. The audio is nicely narrated and I hope to make an effort to improve my listening skills soon with this very resource. You can download the audio easily too, so you can easily put it onto your mp3 player of choice and listen on the go.

The stories are short so it is easy to either quickly listen to it and move on, or to study in depth.

Also, check out the parent (gateway) site, which leads to other websites for children. They include videos and more stories, etc. Click on “パソコン” to access the sites on your computer, the other links are for mobile phones. Some of the content is a bit too much for children (irritating videos on washing your hands because of the flu) but other stuff is cute and easy to understand. Highly recommended! There is also a website to learn about other countries, featuring national anthems and all.

日本の歌

This is a website full of Japanese children’s songs, ordered from easy to hard. Each page has the lyrics, music notation, and music with and without singing. Very nice! There is also a grammatical terms guide.

This one is a bit different in that the website itself isn’t aimed at children but at language learners. However, the songs themselves are children’s songs so I thought it was appropriate to include them on this list.

ふぁんた時間

I really want to explore this website more! It seems like it is a podcast. It feels very professional and I think it may be done by NTT. I’m listening to one now and it has background music which is great, but perhaps also a bit distracting for the language learner. Def one that I want to look more into!

If you know of any more websites intended for Japanese children, please leave me a comment! Also check out my post on Japanese Children’s (print) Books! I think there are advantages to reading from a book, but no audio…

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I’ve previously talked about Reviewing the Kanji website, but it should be mentioned again as it is my favourite place to go and… well, review the kanji.

Speedanki.com is a place where you review kanji combinations based on what level of the JLPT you are up to. Great for reading in context rather than just recognising individual kanji.

JLPT Kanji Project is a great site! You can review kanji including seeing lots of kanji combinations. You can study kanji by JLPT level, and there is also a vocab testing section.

Drill The Kanji is a java applet program that allows you to test you on your kanji. There are on-yomi and kun-yomi tests, meaning tests and a review section.

A Kanji A Day – with a name like that, do I need to say more?

It looks like it was designed by someone from MySpace or something, but Kanji Game is… a great kanji game They also have a compounds game and a katakana and hiragana page.

Previous columns in the Kanji Clinic page offer lots of advice in learning kanji.

So good luck with all your Kanji learning!