Resources

Here is a compilation of useful resources.
They center around CIR work, but not only: there are a lot a good resources for anyone about translation work or Japanese learning.
If you have any suggestion, or any of the links below is broken, please contact me.

Event Organisation

References

Games, Activities, and Lessons

Free Resources

All of the resources in this category are free to use. No copyright issue to fear unless stated otherwise.

Illustrations

  • Irasutoya
    Ever wondered where all these cute illustrations came from? This is the answer.
  • Undraw
    Open source illustrations. You can specify an accent colour, so it goes pretty well with presentations.
  • illust AC
    Free to use illustrations (5 per day with a free account).
  • Isometric
    Isometric illustration. It looks professional, but has a bit of a "startup" vibe.
  • Fresh Folk
    Cute and fresh illustrations. Needs an email and then you can download the whole library (spam free).
  • Humaaans
    Same as the above.
  • pngimg
    Plenty of illustrations with transparent backgrounds. Great for montages. Goes really well with GIMP.
  • Glaze
    Free to use as long as you credit the source. You only get access to a png.

Vector illustrations

Templates

  • Canva
    Great webapp for creating professional looking flyers/posters (you can apply for a free account as a non-profit organisation).
  • Slides Carnival
    Free Powerpoint templates.

Pictures

  • Pixabay
    Royalty-free photographs and images. Don't hesitate to take a look!
  • Unsplash
    Community-driven library of free to use images. You can also contribute your own shots ;)
  • Pexels
    Same as above.
  • The noun Project
    Free pictures and icons. Great resource
  • photo AC
    Free to use stock photos.

Icons

Colour Palettes

  • Colorkit
    A free online tool to find palettes, gradients, for all your graphical needs.
  • Colormind
    A similar tool that uses AI and where you can see previews for websites.
  • Adobe color
    This one is neat to find some colours based on colour harmony.
  • Palettte (with three t's)
    An advanced tool to create your palettes. May not be suited to beginners.

Colour theory
These tutorials can help you better understand and use colour.

Free Software

Free as in ‘freedom of speech,’ and as in ‘free beer.’

Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) is great for two reasons : It's free, which means you don't need any budget like for other software, and its source code is also available for anyone to read and audit. This means that you can know exactly what the software does, and that there is less probability of hidden malicious code.
Beware, some COs will not allow FOSS because there is no tech support, and no one to complain to if something breaks. If that's your case, I'm sorry, there's not much to be done there.

Image editing (Raster graphics)

  • GIMP
    A free image manipulation software. You can do basic editing, using calques, transparency layers, crop/resize images.
  • Krita
    A painting program, more akin to Photoshop than GIMP. It offers some more advanced features, and is also geared towards digital painting.

Vector graphics

  • Inkscape
    Is to vector graphics what Gimp is to raster graphics. Very nice, but has somewhat of a learning curve.

Photo editing (RAW developing)

  • Darktable
    A photo developping/editing tool. It has similar capabilities to Lightroom. It's profiled denoizing tool is pretty amazing.
  • Rawtherapee
    Another photo editing tool. It's a bit more intuitive to use than Darktable, and also produces good results.

Translating and Interpreting

Neat browser extension

Bilingual Dictionaries

Online translation tools

Important: data safety cannot be guaranteed when using these tools, so I recommend not feeding them sensitive/personal info.

  • Deep-L
    Based on Linguee, it is often pretty accurate.
  • Excite
    A Japanese online translation tool in 7 languages.
  • Google Translate
    Infamous online translator.

Glossaries

There's a ton of them. I compiled this list in 2021, so there's some probability that links break there. In which case let me know.

Glossary of glossaries

General
This is not a joke. Usually a good place to start.

Literature

Law and Government

Finance, Tax, Accounting

If you need any of these resources, all my prayers to you.

  • Finance Terminology
    A neat site by Mizuho with tons of explanations for Japanese words related to finance.
  • Accounting
    As the name suggests.
  • Tax
    This one is self-explanatory too.

Medicine, Pharmacology

  • Medical
    Lots of medical terms, very niche but might prove useful.
  • Pharmacology
    Japanese Pharmacological Society's glossary of pharmacological terms.
  • Kusuri no shiori
    A database where you can look up information about medication. They offer both an English and Japanese version.

Culture, Food

Buddhism, Religion

Miscellaneous

  • Japanese Post Zipcode
    A neat way to get the reading for any place you might not know. Just enter the Kanji in 市区町村・町名を入力.

Attached files

Some links broke, so I uploaded the files directly down here. These were all publicly accessible files, published on the internet.

Glossaries

Bilingual documents

Language Learning

Japanese monolingual Dictionaries

  • Jisho by Monokakido
    The best dictionnary app, unfortunately for iOS and MacOS only. You can buy dozens of monolingual/JP-EN dictionaries and the app is super easy to use. I cannot recommend this enough.
  • Kotobank
  • Weblio
  • Slang dictionary
  • Kanji jiten online
  • Contemporary Japanese Corpus
    This is not really a dictionary but a corpus of contemporary written Japanese. You type a word and it shows you in which context it likely appears (what particles it can take, etc.). really useful when you have a word but are unsured how it's used.

Read in Japanese

  • Japanese.io
    Great tool for reading Japanese. You can import your own texts into it.
  • NHK News Easy
    Aimed at an around N3 level, it's good to learn vocabulary to talk about recent events.
  • Syosetsu
    A community-driven website to post/read novels in Japanese.
  • Aozora Bunko
    Here you can read all books that are in the public domain. So it's mostly older books, but it's free.
  • UVA Japanese Text Initiative
    The University of Virginia Library and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library's collaborative effort to make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web.
  • Reajer
    A variety of bilingual texts to practice reading in Japanese.

Watch in Japanese

  • NHK for School
    Full of educative programms for Japanese children up until the end of middle school.
  • こせんだ式日本語教室
    YouTube videos about learning Japanese, in Japanese. The guy is super nice.
  • 日本語の森
    Same as above, but more popular. I'm more a fan of the people that used to run the channel back in 2017, but it's good nonetheless.
  • SuperNative
    Trains your hearing with video clips. You need an account to use.
  • Hirogaru
    A variety of videos/blog articles about different subjects related to Japan. By the Japan Foundation.
  • Animelon
    A website where you can stream anime with subtitles in Japanese.

Writing in English

Writing in Japanese

  • Mail/Letters
    Examples of mail/letters that you can write in Japanese. This is edited by the Japan Post.
  • 文例書式
    Different examples of Japanese written documents.
  • Wajutsu
    Several ways to express yourself in Japanese.
  • 敬語の指針
    A really complete and thorough guide on keigo written in Japanese.
  • 3秒敬語
    A ‘keigo machine translator,’ that lets you input plain Japanese and get keigo. There are also settings for more or less verbosity.
  • Easy Japanese for Work
    A website by the NHK to learn some formal Japanese as well as business manners.

Apps and games for learning Japanese

Flashcards

  • Anki
    A neat little app where you can create your own decks of virtual cards to review vocab, or even download pre-made decks. Learn more about how to use it here.
  • Quizlet
    Less intimidating than Anki, easier to use but also less customisable.

Nintendo 3DS

Nintendo Switch

  • 図書館ⅡSW・名作100選+α
    A neat little soft with plenty of classic texts to read in Japanese for only 800 yen. There also are a few DLCs for even more reading material.
  • 漢検スマート対策
    An official kanji-kentei app, with 5 years of past problems inside for all the levels. It´s a wonderful resource.

Language Exchange

  • Tandem
    An app to find people to chat with in your target language.
  • Hello talk
    A social network where you can exchange with people who want to learn your language.

Lessons

  • Cafetalk
    A website to find tutors for mostly anything, including Japanese (1 on 1).
  • Bright Start Japanese
    A business that offers personalized Japanese Lessons at various locations within Japan.

Miscellaneous

  • Calil
    You can search for any Japanese book and verify its availability in Japanese libraries. Or you can search your local library and see what books they have.

The Danger Zone

You must never go there, Simba

Here are some websites where you can find a great load of free resources about Japanese. For legal purposes, I must ask you to be careful as you might come across copyrighted stuff. Please do not download the copyrighted stuff, as this hurts the greedy distribution companies artist and they really need your money. For all other purposes, I can't recommend enough that you get a VPN.

Don't tell them I told you

  • Anna's archive
    A neat website to download ebooks of old books that have fallen into the public domain. Please do not try to search for copyrighted material like Nihongo Sou Matome, Shin Kanzen Master, or『デキる人の敬語の正しい使い方』
  • Itazuraneko
    They have a great library of Japanese books. I haven't read it, though.
  • Nyaa
    A peer-to-peer website where you can share your non-copyrighted Japanese material with others.