Learning Japanese Names

[okaeri_man]

i'm interested in studying japanese names (first names), so if i were given their kanji i could read it, or if i heard their name i could take a guess at how to write it. anyone know a good site or have any suggestions? thanks.

 

[PaulTB]

i'm interested in studying japanese names

Don't do it man!

(first names), so if i were given their kanji i could read it, or if i heard their name i could take a guess at how to write it. anyone know a good site or have any suggestions? thanks.

Well I know a good one for family names.

Name !!!

but seriously I don't think names are very useful things to study by themselves.

 

[GaijinPunch]

Here' the best one I've found.
¡ÖÆüËܿͤÎ̾Á°¡×Ìܼ¡

 

[rajs20]

Here's another one:

Jim Breen's Pages Have Moved

From what I can tell, this one is pretty huge... So it's probably a good resource if you want to write a name, and want to know what Kanji to use. But, I dunno if it's something you can just sit down with and memorize from, because it has so many names, many of them obscure.

 

[GaijinPunch]

THat list is obscenely huge! Pretty nice, although a shame they don't just learn PHP & MySQL and slap it in a database and make it searchable.

 

[PaulTB]

THat list is obscenely huge! Pretty nice, although a shame they don't just learn PHP & MySQL and slap it in a database and make it searchable.

So what do you call WWWJDIC if it isn't a searchable database?

Note that you can also download ENAMDIC files in Access format IIRC.

 

[rajs20]

Yeah, it's a huge effort they did to make that list... It used to be a part of EDICT but then they made ENAMDICT into a separate spinoff.

Recently I've been doing some programming work w/ EDICT. I made a thing which gathered "frequency of usage" statistics for each word, and use that to generate lists of "important words to know" to input into a flashcard program and stuff like that... I think this would be useful because, as it is, EDICT is great for searching for words, but you can't sit down and memorize words from it directly since you wouldn't know where to start. Maybe it might be useful to do something similar for ENAMDICT, although for simple searching through the list, I think it's already possible

 

[PaulTB]

Yeah, it's a huge effort they did to make that list... It used to be a part of EDICT but then they made ENAMDICT into a separate spinoff.

Recently I've been doing some programming work w/ EDICT. I made a thing which gathered "frequency of usage" statistics for each word

I hope you checked out the Monash Nihongo FTP Archive first.

Particularly the wordfreq files.

I did quite a bit of work on that stuff myself - particularly in preparing modified data files for the Kanji Gold program (also to be found in the Monash archive). Unfortunately it isn't possible to correct / add to the kanji information (readings etc) in Kanji Gold which slightly reduces its value as it is not so accurate on the rarer kanji.

 

[okaeri_man]

Don't do it man!

probably good advice

thanks for the sites. i'll start with the not so obscure ones i think... and stop before i get to the obscure ones...

 

[rajs20]

I hope you checked out the Monash Nihongo FTP Archive first.

Ahhh, thanks for the link. I had heard that something like this was done, but I didn't realize those statistics were in the public domain. Oh well, this is actually useful because my stats are based on google searches, and theirs are based on newspapers. So, I can take both sources into account to get a more accurate picture of "general usage".