My interest in Japan

I am originally from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where I took French for three years in high school. (The offerings were French, Spanish, and German.) By the time I came to the UW-Madison, I had decided that I wanted to spend a year abroad, but not in Europe, because I thought I could learn more from the greater contrasts a non-western country would offer. Because I used to be an Electrical Engineering major, I began to take Japanese courses in order to earn the Technical Japanese certification offered by the engineering department. By the time I finished my year in Japan, I had finished most of the courses required for the Japanese major, and I knew I no longer wanted to pursue Engineering. So I became a double-major in computer science and Japanese.

I spent the 1994-1995 school year at Keio University in Tokyo. I lived about an hour by train out of the city and commuted to school every day. Most of my classes were specifically geared towards foreign students studying Japanese, but second semester, I took a computer science course with Japanese students at Keio University-Fujisawa Campus, which boasts one of the most up to date computer systems in Japan.

using your computer to study Japanese

Computers can be an effective tool in learning languages. Learning any language requires the student to organize and memorize a large amount of information, and a computer can be a tireless study partner, useful for drills, fast dictionary lookups, and accessing language resources from faraway countries. However, in the case of the Japanese language, most Western computers require some extra configuration to display the enormous character set.

When I'm running NT, for web browsing Japanese documents from my computer at home, I use Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 with the Japanese International Extension for Windows 95 and NT 4.0. You need the MS Gothic font included in this MSIE extension to make the document encoding option work in Netscape under Windows (unless you have some other source of Japanese fonts.) When I'm running Linux, I run Netscape Explorer 3.0. Linux is distributed with enough Japanese fonts to make Netscape setup trivial, and all you have to do is select the Japanese document encoding option.

Once you have a browser capable of reading Japanese, you can access everything from Kana and Kanji drills online at MIT to popular newspapers like Asahi Shimbun,and Mainichi Shimbun. You can also browse around Microsoft Japan. (If you'd like to see these sites but don't have Japanese capabilitie s, Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, mirror parts of these sites in English.)

If you are interested in trying more Japanese language related software, try this mirror of the Monash shareware/freeware repository at cdrom.com. I recommend Stephen Chung's freeware Japanese word processor, JWP, which you can download from this site in both 16 and 32 bit versions for Windows.

caitlin at cs dot wisc dot edu
This site last updated July 1998.