Back from Japan. It was amazing!!!

Endlich, Ende April gehts nach Japan!!!
Nur kurz, aber immerhin.

At Japancast.net you find a podcast with lots of homemade Japanese language lessons which are quite useful and some other information about Japan. Listening to the lessons is fun! The first bunch of lessons can be downloaded via a torrentfile. If you are one of the people listening to music via mp3 player a lot, try Japancast instead of music. You learn more!

Typisch japanisch, ne? 1-Click.

A very helpful grammarbook ist to be found on taekims Guide to Japanese. There is also a partly German version available. I printed all the pages out for better readability and now work them through. The example sentences are in kanji and hiragana. Because there is no small hiragana above the kanji, it may be difficult to translate the kanji. Best would be to enter the kanji by handwriting into Palm’s Padict. At least you really learn something.

In case you want to look up some information in a grammarbook, you can use this one. But don’t rely on it too much, as it is only in romaji, so there is no training effect by reading this book. All grammar stuff is shortly explained and some examples are given. But there are only a few examples per theme, mostly two to four.

This german book is intended for better remembering the kanji. Therefore the historical development is explained. This may be interesting but actually is not the best way to keep the kanji in mind, as the development is most of the time too far away from the actual kanji. Plus I missed a lot of kanjis which I found in the Kanji Pict-O-Graphix. Still, you find words which consist of more than one kanji (Though you won’t ever need that when you use padict and Kanjipict-o-graphix).

If you are interested in learning japanese, you don’t need this book. It starts with such complex sentences, that you don’t have any chance to understand them if you are not an advanced learner. If you are an advanced learner, you wonder why there are hiragana and katakana explained, things you probably learned a while ago. So this book may help people to have more success in reading mangas, but for people wanting to learn Japanese, it is more entertainment than helpful.

Padict is an electronic dictionary for Palm handheld or at least Handhelds with Palm OS. It is open source, and therefore for free. If you want to buy an electronic dictionary, which I think is very useful as looking for kanji is a lot easier than in a paper dictionary, you may buy a palm and install padict instead of buying a more expensive special English-Japanese or German-Japanese dictionary.
The cheapest Palm, the Palm Z22, costs about 100 Euro at amazon and I think its very useful as you can do a lot more than only install a dictionary.
German-Japanese (edict) and English-Japanese (wadoku) dictionaries are available. Padict offers search in both directions. You can insert kanji by handwriting recognition, hiragana, katakana or romaji. Stroke order is shown for a lot of kanjis. The interface is okay. Overall extremely useful.

by michael Rowley. This is a very useful book for understanding and learning kanji. There are different approaches to learn Kanji. One would be to repeatedly write them until you keep them in mind. This is an uneffective way though. A second way would be to understand, of which parts they are composed. These parts are easier to learn. To keep the whole kanji in mind, you just learn of which parts it consists, and maybe with some twists, or a story, you keep the parts in mind. E. G. the verb sagasu, to search. It consists of a hand, a hole and a tree. So you search with your hand in a hole behind a tree. Imagine the picture. You only have to connect that picture with the verb sagasu and you can write the kanji.
For every kanji in this book (over thousand), the parts are explained and linked to the originals. For me, that is the most important thing in this book. Also an explanation or a story to keep the kanja better in mind is given. Hiragana and Katakana too (and it really makes it easier for at least some of them to remember). German amazon link.