Japanese Blogs?

April 26, 2006 9:15 AM

I want to start reading some Japanese blogs in an effort to improve my grasp of the language. Any suggestions?

I'm terrible with Kanji, and reading something like the Asahi or Mainichi Shinbun turns into a tiring exercise of trying to look up words I'll probably never see again. What are your favorite Japanese blogs and other sites that don't use incomprehensible (to me) news-speak?

posted by borkingchikapa to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

I don't know of any blogs, but whatever you choose to read you may find easier with rikai. It's a proxy that parses a Japanese web page and turns all kanji into links. When you mouse over the links the definition pops up.

It has a tendency to make you lazy and you might not want to bother writing down the words so you can actually learn them, so be careful.

Also, I don't know if it qualifies as a blog, but I like reading slashdot.jp.
posted by ducksauce at 9:34 AM on April 26, 2006

I dont know much about japanese blogs, but you might find useful links at www.securitygirl.net and www.muninn.net. (look in their blogrolls). Two East Asian Studies graduate students with blogs. Might not be the kind of topics or language level you're looking for, but it might be a start. Mostly academic topics.
posted by jak68 at 10:38 AM on April 26, 2006

Also a few in Gen's blogroll.

You can also randomly browse through blogs on blog hosting sites like livedoor.

Oh and another browser tranlating tool if you didn't already know: gTranslate for Firefox.
posted by p3t3 at 11:17 AM on April 26, 2006

Watshi to Tokyo used to be good for htis sort of thing, but I think she sort of disappeared...
posted by Lockeownzj00 at 5:52 PM on April 26, 2006