In a recent posting by Al Bartle at Smith’s School of English in Okamoto he made reference to some of the challenges all of us face in the classroom in helping our students to improve their English and specifically he mentioned pronunciation which is definitely a challenge, especially when trying to change the sometimes deeply ingrained KATAKANA pronunciation of many English words!
I especially appreciate the link he included in his posting to a very useful website which helps us to teach our students the true expressions in English!
Al’s posting reminded me of two other sites which I have been using for years.
1. http://www.alc.co.jp/index.html
They have a great English to Japanese and Japanese to English dictionary which gives extensive examples and also accepts input of multiple words and phrases.
2. http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl
This site has proven very useful for me when trying to read messages sent to me in Japanese with difficult kanji and my students also use this site when reading messages in English containing unknown vocabulary.
The reason I find this site particularly useful is because it preserves the original text while providing the translation of the kanji characters in English along with the Hiragana or Katakana reading.
Thanks again for the posting Al; I’ve already bookmarked that site.
Perhaps others out there will find the additional two sites which I suggested useful also.
Alex Stanciu
Smith’s School of English Horie スミス英会話堀江校
http://www.smithweb.co.jp/school/horie.shtml
Smith’s School of English Fuse スミス英会話布施校
http://www.smithweb.co.jp/school/fuse.shtml
Smith’s School of English Kamishinjo スミス英会話上新庄校
http://www.smithweb.co.jp/school/kamishinjyo.shtml