online dictionaries and lookups
Man, I don't know what I'd do without the Internet. I'd suck at Japanese, that's for sure. It takes a special kind of stubborn to flip through the onion skin pages of a paperback two-way dictionary for ten minutes until you find the word you want, and hunting down kanji by stroke count and radical type is famous for driving Asian Language majors over the edge. Fortunately, you don't have to do that stuff anymore. Follow the links below to the best Japanese dictionaries in the world, all of them free.
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Every student to study Japanese in the past ten years owes Jim Breen a hug. This guy founded and maintains the biggest online dictionary for Japanese in the world: the EDICT Project. It's like Wikipedia for Japanese words. You can find everything in here, including ancient battle metaphors, street slang, Yakuza codespeak... everything. (Thank you, Jim Breen.)
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Jisho.org is actually just another face for EDICT, but many students prefer it for its cleaner interface. It runs from a dedicated mirror server (so if the original WWWJDIC goes down, jisho.org still runs, and vice-versa).
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I have heard this site's name pronounced "slidge-fack", as in "Slidge-fack this kanji for me, bro." It is a simple little site that offers kanji lookup by stroke input. That means instead of counting the strokes and looking through a list of radicals, you just draw the darn kanji in the little white box and the applet guesses at which one you mean. If the kanji you want doesn't come up in the list of guesses, you might need to try writing the strokes in a different order.
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A simple interface that tabs examples from multiple dictionary databases, so instead of getting words and their definitions, you get the word used in a sentence. This is particularly useful when you're trying to tease out the meaning of a word in a sentence, or when you find a word used in some idiomatic phrase that doesn't make sense (yet).
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Another face for the EDICT, with another dedicated server. Give it a try; it might be your favorite.
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