Welcome

Welcome to romaji.co.uk - this site aims to provide several tools from within the browser to help a student learning Japanese with their revision.
There are several categories, and each category has several sub-categories of words and phrases which a student of the Japanese Language may wish to learn.
The tools which currently exist are the Revision Aid and the Test Yourself tools. I would recommend going through the categories in the Revision Aid section first, and when you are confident with your knowledge, try testing yourself.
New features, and new words will be added regularly. At the moment it is designed to help revise Introductory Japanese.
Currently all questions and answers are in Romaji and English - Hiragana and Katakana translations are one of many planned features. I have however started this process, and some of the revision sheets now have hiragana. But for the moment, as I'm learning to speak and listen to Japanese, being able to quickly see the way words should be pronounced is most important to me.
If you want to buy anything to help with your Japanese learning, you can visit my store.

This site is designed around the course provided in Japanese for Busy People: Bk. 1.
As I progress with the site, it will be drawing more from Japanese for Busy People: Bk. 2.

News

Wednesday 9/6/2010

Added a few more kanji symbols to the kanji quiz. Also started developing the new website - that might mean there will be few, and smaller updates for a couple of weeks, but hopefully the new site will be worth the wait, and will integrate all the ideas I have together.

Tuesday 8/6/2010

Started work on a Kanji Quiz. Also added Relative Directions to Home And Surroundings category.

Monday 7/6/2010

Second kanji lesson added.

Thursday 3/6/2010

I think & hope I've made the kana conversions of all the words in the dictionary - if you find any that I've not yet done, please drop me an email (luke@romaji.co.uk). Given that everything has been Kana'ised, I can now roll out the Kana/Romaji & Kana/English quizzes for those who feel a bit more confident. There may well be some kind of interface change now that there are six buttons, rather than just two, to make things look a little tidier and improve usability. I also got rid of the slow flash advert on the mobile site and replaced it with a more aesthetic and much quicker to load text link.

Tuesday 1/6/2010

I've decided I am going to start to learn Kanji... I will need to learn it for the second course, so might as well make a start on it now, so that I'm not struggling like I did with Hiragana and Katakana. I'll plan to add around 5 new kanji each week, so not much, but enough to get a head start and not feel pressured! Obviously, I will be adding a javascript tool to help one with revising them in the coming weeks!!

Saturday 29/5/2010

Added a few more katakana translations in the shopping section

Thursday 27/5/2010

Another excuse - bad health kept me away from the site. Am feeling fitter now however - so added a load more kana to the site...it's mostly done now...and when it is finished, I can roll out the next feature!

Thursday 20/5/2010

No updates for a while - have been busy with my exams...all over now though, so will be back to maintaining the site with increased regularity. Today I fixed a javascript bug which meant the pages didn't function correctly on IE7, which, annoyingly, is the version of IE that the college has. The site apparently is now usable from with the college :). Noticed a couple of typo's whilst doing my revision thing, they're now fixed - woot!

Tuesday 11/5/2010

Working on getting all the words/phrases to contain their hiragana and katakana versions. There are now 300 phrases with kana out of the nearly 450 total. So I've passed the 2/3rds mark - woo! Once it's all done, I'll add kana to the quiz, for those who want to really push themselves! Also, thanks to Jim Breen for adding a link to my site from his list of good Japanese sites.

Monday 10/5/2010

Worked a bit on the back end, to make it easier for me to add kana, and allow me to edit existing entries. I've added kana for numbers and body parts, and some other bits and bobs

Friday 7/5/2010

Started work on the mobile friendly site - http://m.romaji.co.uk. It currently only has a version of the revision aid. Users with a mobile browser will automatically get redirected. It will be undergoing some work, in time!

Later Thursday 6/5/2010

Added Seasons & Weather, days of the month to Times and Dates and Restaurant Phrases, jobs to Family, and Countries to Beginners Phrases, and some extra food and drink items to Food and Drink. All in all, nearly 150 extra words/phrases added today! I think that's a record for any single day!!!

Thursday 6/5/2010

Added Colours to the Various category. Added the category "Shopping" which currently contains the Clothing, Electrical Goods and Shops categories. Also did some work to allow me to input data into the dictionary. Doesn't look pretty yet, but it's a start - and is a lot faster than the old method!

Wednesday 5/5/2010

No new words yet today - but some work on the back end, to run the system off a MySQL based dictionary, rather than a text file. This gives me more flexibility regarding what I can do with the data, and that is why there is now a link to "Full Dictionary" - this contains all the translations in the Revise/Test yourself things, but as a flat file. It might help me with Search Engine Optimisation! Another benefit of the MySQL backend, is that I shouldn't lose kana characters when altering the dictionary, as I won't be touching the data already stored. I think I lost the kana I did, due to some uploading issue where the ftp program or a text editor set the wrong file encoding type on the dictionary file. Oh, and as a final piece of good news - The first Search Engine visitor appeared this week - which is great news for me as it means strangers are beginning to find the site!

Tuesday 4/5/2010

Found that something had messed up all kana translations on the site - sorry for that. Have restored most of them. Have also added examples for the verbs.

Thursday 29/4/2010

Added some new counters to the Numbers and Counters section, some verbs to the Beginners words and phrases section and relative dates to the Times and Dates section. Just translations, no examples or kana - sorry!

Wednesday 28/4/2010

Added Surroundings to Home and Surroundings. Complete with examples, but no kana. I also added a links page - it's quite sparse at the moment, but if anyone would like reciprical linking, or even just feels like their site is so awesome I should send it traffic anyway, please email me (luke@romaji.co.uk), and I'll add a link!

Friday 23/4/2010

Changed "Test Yourself" section to be similar to "Revise" section in so far as it does not rely on javascript alerts. Also changed the Revise section to support katakana and hiragana - as yet there are only a couple of phrases with this provided, but, like everything on this site, expect it soon!

Thursday 22/4/2010

Redesigned site to look much nicer. Added the Revision Aid app, and the Hobbies and Pets subcategories to the Free Time category. I started adding a couple of example sentences to a few words for the Revision Aid, however there is a lot to do before it is comprehensive.

Wednesday 21/4/2010

Added Body Parts category, and Rooms sub category to the Home and Surroundings category and started writing a little bit about me - to aid in sentence structure.

Tuesday 20/4/2010

Just added Months sub category to the Times And Dates category, and made a prettier logo image.

Friday 16/4/2010

Just added Weekdays sub category to the Times And Dates category.