Using Perapera-kun to read Japanese wikipedia

Hello there, today I'm a bit busy so I thought I'd give a brief example of how Perapera-kun (mentioned in my previous post) can be extremely useful for learning to read Japanese.

Anyway, for some reason I ended up on the Japanese wikipedia page for house mouse.

From the page:

ハツカネズミ（二十日鼠、廿日鼠、house mouse）は、ネズミ目（齧歯目）ネズミ科 ハツカネズミ属の1種。学名は Mus musculus。

Chock full of vocab I've never used or heard before! If you'd eventually like to converse at an adult level, basic education like biology terms are probably necessary to learn sooner or later. Anyway, let's break it down:

ハツカネズミ, the term for house mouse, which literally means 20-day mouse.

二十日鼠/廿日鼠 (ハツカネズミ, the two ways to write in kanji). Note that because the title of the article is not in kanji, it is not standard practice to write this animal's name in kanji (as is often the case with animal and plant names).

ネズミ目 (ネズミもく), Order Rodentia (remember that whole Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species stuff in your high school bio classes?).

齧歯目 (げっしもく）, rat-like, rodent.

ネズミ科　（ネズミか）, mouse Family.

ハツカネズミ属　(ハツカネズミぞく）, house-mouse Genus.

一種 (いっしゅ), one kind of.

学名 (がくめい), scientific name, Latin name.

So, using Perapera-kun to parse the words over, we can readily translate in our heads:

The house mouse is one type of house-mouse that belongs to the mouse Family and rodent Order. Its scientific name is Mus musculus.

Anyway, you get the idea. Basically perapera-kun saves you a ton of time looking up kanji, readings, and definitions. Trust me, it goes a long way to being able to read Japanese web-pages.

By the way, if you wondering why they're called 20-day mice in Japanese, read wikipedia's explanation:

妊娠期間が20日程度であることから「はつかねずみ」の名が付いたとされる。

(Practice using perapera-kun if you don't understand!)

じゃね

こんにちは！

Greetings!

I recently decided that while I was learning Japanese on my own, I would publish some notes on the language and learning resources that are available. Since I truly believe that one learns best when teaching a subject, I thought I would give it a shot.

Anyway, for my first post I thought I'd share a couple of resources that I love.

First of all, jisho.org. The usefulness of this site is not its dictionary entries, nor is it the kanji database. The best part of this site is the massive collection of sentences that can be searched by English words, Japanese words, kanji, or combinations thereof.

For example, let's say I want to know the word for jacket. After finding out that it's 上着（うわぎ, uwagi), I can then click the sentences option to obtain any sentences in the database which contain this word. The first, for example:
彼は上着を掛けた。 He hung up his coat.
Furthermore, each Japanese word is linked back to its dictionary entry (in case you don't know the reading or meaning). Also, there's an option to give you kanji details, if any in the sentence are unfamiliar.

One caveat about the site: for those who don't yet know how to read kana, it will prove much less useful for learning. My recommendation: put the time in and learn those kana as soon as possible!

Next, for those of you who use Firefox, I'd recommend downloading the add-on "Perapera-kun." (ペラペラ君). When enabled, it allows you to parse through any Japanese you encounter on the web, by giving the readings and definitions simply scrolling over words. (On a side note, there is also a version for those who are learning Mandarin Chinese.) As far as I am concerned, it is the best tool for reading Japanese webpages out there - no need to copy and paste words and bring them back to a dictionary website.

Finally for now, we need tools to get listening practice! For those who already know a fair amount of Japanese, I'd recommend the program KeyHole TV. This program streams live Japanese TV. Download it here: KeyHole TV.

There are a few good channels which are always present: TBS, TV東京 (TV Tokyo), 日本テレビ (Japan TV), 関西TV (Kansai TV - Kansai is the western region of Japan), テレビ朝日 (Asahi TV), and フジテレビ (Fuji TV). There are also a number of channels which appear and disappear every once in a while, including a few radio stations.

That's it for now. I hope these tools can help you along your journey to fluency!