ようこそ！ (´• ω •)ﾉ

##japanese on Freenode IRC is a channel where members can learn or practice their Japanese with natives and proficient learners.

Channel basics

The members of ##japanese are a casual bunch, and we talk about a variety of subjects. Don’t be afraid to interrupt with a question related to Japanese.

Discussions related to Japanese and Japan have priority over others, which can continue in ##japanese-offtopic to accommodate everyone’s needs.

Write Japanese with at least kana if you can.

People will try to help you by fixing your sentences in Japanese or in English, explaining or pointing to relevant documentation. You are welcome to do so as well. Caution is advised on the reliability of this advice, and we encourage stating one’s doubts when explaining something.

Our bot K5 offers features such as dictionary lookups. If not relevant to the conversation, use private messaging with the bot.

Avoid flooding, listen to others, and remember we’re here for Japanese!

Encoding

To display Japanese, your chat client must use UTF-8. We don’t use ISO-2022-JP or Shift-JIS.

Resources

Guides

• An Introduction to Japanese - A thorough write-up explaining many concepts
• Teach Yourself Japanese - Great site to learn kana and some Japanese basics
• Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese - This is an excellent website to learn a lot of Japanese grammar. However, you need to be comfortable reading kana.

Reference documentation

• Wikibooks Japanese - An incomplete but useful site for beginners
• Kim Allen’s overview of Japanese - This site has no kanji but it does give a pretty good overview of grammar plus the author’s personal experience of how she learned Japanese.
• Imabi - A thorough reference site from a guy with a broken car
• The Japanese Page, archive here - A multiuser site that covers various aspects of Japanese
• JGram: The Japanese Grammar Database, archive here - A reference site for Japanese grammar

Interactive learning

• Foreign Numbers - Nifty tool to become more fluent in numbers
• JapaneseClass.jp - A web application to help you learn Japanese Language like playing RPG game, earn EXP, gain Level, and get Ranked.
• Learning Languages Through Video Games - Annotated and translated game scripts
• Lang-8 - A multilingual blogging and correction website. Native Japanese will correct your Japanese, while you can correct other user’s writings of English or your native tongue.

Dictionaries

• eow.alc.co.jp - A great source of example sentences, English ⇄ Japanese
• weblio.jp - An online version of the Daijirin Japanese dictionary
• kakijun.jp - A kanji dictionary, very useful for calligraphy
• jisho.org - An online version of the JMDict Japanese glossary, JMnedict proper name database and KANJIDIC2 kanji database, Tatoeba example corpus and more
• tagainijisho - An offline version of the JMDict Japanese glossary, KANJIDIC2 kanji database, and KanjiVG stroke order database