improve japanese translation skills

Summary

MIT has joined a growing list of universities worldwide in the OCW (OpenCourseWare) Consortium. An OpenCourseWare is "a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses".

Of interest to language learners is MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Department on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. While courses in this department range from "Communicating Across Cultures" and "Japanese Literature and Cinema" to "Topics in South Asian Literature and Culture" and "Expository Writing for Bilingual Students", they do also include specific language education courses. Currently at ocw.mit.edu, OpenCourseWares are available for learning the French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish languages.

What makes these truly "free and open" to the general public is the Creative Commons license under which these OpenCourseWares are licensed: The Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 3.0 License. In a nutshell, this license gives the public freedom to share, copy, distribute, display and make derivative works of the courses as long as they give proper attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes and "share alike" (under the same license) any new changes or improvements.

This is an exciting project to see! In time, free and "OpenCourseWares" should be available for learning all the world's major languages and, I hope, at least some of the minority languages as well. Bravo MIT and the OCW Consortium!

From Website

MIT OpenCourseWare is an idea—and an ideal—developed, supported, and embraced by the MIT faculty, who share the Institute's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world. In 1999 the Faculty considered how to take best advantage of the Internet to advance education, and in 2000 proposed OCW. The rest is our history...

Link

Visit the MIT OpenCourseWare Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.

From Website

This site's purpose:

This site was made to help anyone who is studying Japanese, specifically studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). if you don't know anything about the test, a good place to start is the Japan foundation of LA (though it is mainly overview and where to apply information). We have more information about the test on this site at about the JLPT.

What this site can do:

The main point of this site is to act as a day-by-day calendar with a new kanji from the level of the test you are studying for. So, registering makes this site much more useful (it is free, painless, and we'll never send it to anyone). When you register the site remembers what level you are studying for, and automatically loads the kanji that will appear on the test you are studying for. Also, any vocab on the vocab list for that level will be displayed below the kanji. If you click on one of the kanji in the vocab list (anywhere on the site) a pop up with the kanji and all of its compounds in the dictionary will appear.

Additionally, you can download the kanji or vocab lists for any level in a html formatted file (you can view them with word or some other word processor program). These will be customizable to the extent of you can choose what you want on your list (ie: kanji, kana, definition or kanji, romaji, part of speech, definition). There is also a Japanese -> English and English->Japanese dictionary and a Kanji dictionary on the right toolbar. Anytime you look up a word or view "Today's Kanji" you can choose to add the vocab/kanji to your personal list. This is usefull when word comes up that you want to remember, you can have quick access to it with your vocab/kanji list.

Comments

An excellent site for learning Japanese kanji, as well as hiragana and katakana.

This is an excellent resource for Japanese learners of all levels.

Visit Kanji-a-Day.com