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I'd recommend this instead. This is also nice. You should also find some method of communicating with native speakers as well, like this.

The Japan Foundation has some guides on their web sites that do help. (http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/kansai/index.html) Actually there are a lot of sites, dashboard gadgets and stuff out there to help you memorize kanjis or learn the weirdest combinations.. remember that even the japanese average citizen does not know all of them. Unlike our alphabet where one does learn how to read and then move on to grammar and vocabulary theirs recquire you to keep learning the kanjis virtually forever. Even they do, so, ??????????. This may help as well, ( http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl ) good luck

Why, just read Slashdot in Japanese!

actually, I read it using an interesting web service that shows the definition of each word when you mouse over them. Try it!

I'd gain an extra 500 words of vocab that I'd loose just as fast. For me, only words that I saw all the time really stuck.
I've been using Supermemo for the palm pilot now for about a year (mostly with my own Japanese sets), and I'm not sure the author gave it a fair try. It's not really a program geared towards initial studying like most flashcard programs. It's main purpose is solving this exact long-term retention problem--it figures out for each card the next day you need to see it such that you'll remember 90% (configurable) of the cards you see. Not sure I'd call it magic, but it's been a real breakthrough for me. And yes, of course memorizing vocabulary isn't learning a language--but it's certainly a necessary step.

My Rikai website can do the same mouse-hover thing online, mediating/translating existing web-pages/news-sites/etc. See: http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh

Allow me to introduce you to the most useful site you will ever find: http://www.rikai.com/ Plug in a Japanese web site URL and click "go". Mouse over any kanji and it will pop up a reading and translation of it.

It's by far the most useful thing I've found.

Ughh. What's the hardest thing about learning Japanese? Kanji. Try looking up 1 character a sentence while reading and see how quickly you become "lazy". Here are some recomendations: Some version of supermemo to help them memorize/study kanji and vocab. Or Stackz, KingKanji, learnAlphabets, etc. Use a version on a PDA and they can/will study on the train, on line at the bank, etc. Get a Japanese model so it'll have handwriting recognition, and you have a character dictionary that'll beat Halpern &/or Nelson hands down. There's a thread on this at Jim Breen's site. And, lastly, for intermediate learning, get them reading news with my own rikai, or better yet, finish the moji/rikai plugin for mozilla!

Ughh. What's the hardest thing about learning Japanese? Kanji. Try looking up 1 character a sentence while reading and see how quickly you become "lazy". Here are some recomendations: Some version of supermemo to help them memorize/study kanji and vocab. Or Stackz, KingKanji, learnAlphabets, etc. Use a version on a PDA and they can/will study on the train, on line at the bank, etc. Get a Japanese model so it'll have handwriting recognition, and you have a character dictionary that'll beat Halpern &/or Nelson hands down. There's a thread on this at Jim Breen's site. And, lastly, for intermediate learning, get them reading news with my own rikai, or better yet, finish the moji/rikai plugin for mozilla!

I took japanese at university and the only access we had to computers was in the library, not during class.

The school offered no e-learning but our coursebook had a homepage. So technically if you accessed the homepage at the library the university was offering e-learning.

Not having specific e-teaching is fine since teaching languages doesn't really need/benefit from using computers. Especially japanese: all reports and essays have to be written by hand anyway, doing japanese auto-input on a keyboard doesn't exactly help the students kanji writing skills.

That's not saying that you should't have computers. They are very good for self-study. What you can do / what I did at home was:

Put various websites through rikai like slashdot.jp or asahi shinbun.

Lookup kanji/words with gjiten for linux or jquicktrans (radical lookup is great) for windows. This is almost like a denshi-jisyo.

Flashcard programs: kgold etc.

Of course it's important to have a correctly set-up keyboard and all fonts installed. Windows handles this just fine. I had no problems with linux, but it could be my great dist. The macs at school were a catastrophe (you had to cut/paste kanji from a table containing all kanji).

Jim Breen has an extensive page about japanese with a lot about software. You can google for his name.

Remember to have a goal for each teaching session and to properly teach the students how to use all software you're going to use in class. I.e. don't just plunk students in front of a computer, tell them to open a program and hope they'll take it from there. They will also need a task/exercise to do if they are going to use the computer. Otherwise everyone will just sit there, doing nothing, waiting for class to end. This is a common problem with schools who hope computers will magically teach the students as long as the students sit for a while in front of the computers.

Here is a suggestion, do your project in perl like rikai

Actually, check this out (Note, the actual post is a pointless troll, but...) the sig is in Chinese(running it through rikai Chinese it does appear to say something along the lines of sexual kitten(at least in my browser). Who knows?
???
???
Though I can't seem to write them(thus the ???)

Moji

rikaixul, my own project which was functional a year ago but noone's touched in some time.
Jim Breen runs a really great list of online resources for Japanese, most of which are at least free-beer if not free-speech.
While you're on-line, there's the free-beer Rikai, which, like those mozilla plugins, should help you get through Japanese pages (try asahi.com or 2chan.net for a laugh)
Anyway, presumably the mozilla plugins would let one have a working solution on higher-end palmtop devices.

As others have noted, online dictionaries are much harder to use for offline text if you don't know how to input the kanji (keyboard kanji input systems are phonetic, which assumes you already know the pronounciation of the word you want). The Tejina handwriting pad popup is a start that may help the first years after you've learned stroke order principles; once you get it to recognize some kanji you can paste them to a word dictionary (the Tejina dictionary only has info on individual kanji characters).

I doubt that much of this stuff is multimedia, but one site you should definitely look at is Jim Breen's Japanese page.

Jim Breen is the guy behind the EDICT Japanese/English dictionary file, which powers a lot of open-source Japanese-learning software (including mine).

His website has a bunch of useful links in a variety of categories, including literature, educational resource, and software - both free and commercial.

Two of the free software projects especially worth mentioning are JGloss and Rikai.com

To read the page mentioned in the article simply cut-and-paste the URL.

I recommend this Windows soft: JquickTrans (IMHunbiased?!not!O)

Also this site is a like a proxy that translates webpages and stuff, adding code for pop-up hints on kanji and words, plus more: Rikai

And of course, the only way to really learn a language is to go live where they speak it... which would be good for a lot of Americans. And try not to hang-out with your English speaking friends all the time.

Another problem with using it for web pages is that (at least the last time i tried) mozilla doesn't seem to want to copy kanji to the clipboard to paste into the dictionary program.

The 2 solutions i've tried are www.rikai.com as someone else mentioned, which will grab a page and add nice little javascript popups to all the kanji, and using w3 mode to read the web page in emacs, and using edict.el for dictionary lookup(or cut and paste into xjdic). Both work fairly well, rikai is probably a bit easier to use, but working in emacs seems a bit easier if i want to chop out a difficult chunk and make notes as i try to read it....

As someone else pointed out, you can download the Japanese IME for Windows 98 from Microsoft. It only allows you to input japanese text on web pages though, so it probably is of little use to you. (Information on the Windows Global IME
I've had the best luck using Windows 2000 - when you install the system, you can install a Japanese IME. If you then set your regional settings for Japan, it is also really easy to copy/cut/paste kanji, ICQ works right, etc. etc. It is pretty nice.
Of course, if you don't want to bother with getting IME input to work right at the OS level, you can get multibyte support for ntemacs up and running, which does have its own Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc.) IME.
If you are interested in reading Japanese web pages, then you will probably love www.rikai.com. The site uses a server side script to load in edict readings for each kanji which pops up on mouseover.
That's about all I have to say about that.
BTW, if you are interested, I'm currently translating the Great Teacher Onidzuka manga using a Win2k system with Japanese input (along with a Java client / server thing)