Learning Kanji on Twitter

Here are a couple of twitter users who can help you study Japanese.

@learnkanji (http://twitter.com/learnkanji) writes: "Learn japanese vocabulary with Twitter! You will learn a new word every day. Each word will be written in kanji, hiragana, romaji and english."

A simple idea but a good one. @learnkanji is probably better for beginner/lower intermediate levels though as the kanji are pretty simple. Here are some recent examples:

女 -- おんな -- onna -- woman‚ female
南 -- みなみ -- minami -- south
漢字 -- かんじ -- kanji -- Chinese characters‚ kanji
今年 -- ことし -- kotoshi -- this year

For a bit more of a challenge try @wa_k (http://twitter.com/wa_k). The kanji tend to be harder and they post two or three each day - also you can click through to a nice calligraphic version. I tend to pick the hardest one each day and stick it up as my computer's desktop background. So everytime I come back to my desk between classes the kanji is reinforced. Learning one kanji a day may seem like a slow process, but it's better than doing nothing and I figure I'm here for the long haul. Also - it works. Here's one kanji I learned the other day:

拝 - MEANING: worship, pray to, adore, look at (with reverence) PRONUNCIATION: hai, oga(mu) http://flic.kr/p/7UfFcg

Later that evening I was watching a movie ("A Merchant of Venice" with Al Pacino as Shylock as it happens) and as my eyes lazily hovered over the subtitles this kanji kept leaping out at me, most notably in these words: 礼拝堂　（れいはいどう - chapel) and 拝啓 (はいけい - a formal salutation at the beginning of a letter. So you see, slow and steady really does win the race!