This is a supplementary website designed to go with the revised edition of the "Nakama" series of Japanese language textbooks (Nakama 1a and 1b). Here you can do some preparatory study, or reviewing, of kana, kanji and vocabulary.

• You can prepare for, or review the lessons found in the revised edition of the Nakama texts.
• You can study hiragana and katakana. The site has information on writing order, flashcards and some interesting games too.
• There is a list of kanji arranged in accordance with Nakama lessons, along with animations to show the stroke order. The animation includes audio that counts aloud the number of strokes as the kanji is written.
• Vocabulary words are accompanied by audio data and accent marks, allowing you to check easily how they are read.

The contents are: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Vocabulary.

Let's look at the Hiragana section.
There is a chart of the Japanese syllabary. Click on the kana on the chart to see an animation showing how it is written.

Aside from this, there are kana flashcards and two kinds of games.

The Ultimate Kana Challenge is one of the kana games. The kana move across the screen randomly. The objective of the game is to remove all the kana characters from the screen by clicking on them in the correct order, i.e. from "あ" to "ん", as quickly as possible. It's interesting to see all the kana floating about freely, and the game is harder than you'd think!

In the Hiragana Trainer (Quick Kana ) game, the kana are shown one by one, with your task being to read each letter aloud. Before starting, you choose the speed at which they appear, then you try to keep up with the speed you set.

In the Kanji section, there is a kanji list for each textbook chapter.

You can see the kanji that appear in that chapter, plus vocabulary words and photos of signs found around town that use those kanji.

Click on a kanji and you can see an animation showing how to write it, including audio guiding you through the stroke order.

The Vocabulary section is also arranged according to chapter number.
We tried looking at Chapter 3. The new vocabulary found in the chapter appears as a list, and you can listen to spoken Japanese for each, with animated accent marks included to help you check the correct pronunciation

As you can enjoy trying any of the sections by yourself, this is a convenient little site for both lesson preparation and review.

We also have an article, Friends of NAKAMA ( Introduction article ), about the first edition of the 'Nakama' textbooks.