WHERE do languages come from? That is a question as old as human beings’ ability to pose it. But it has two sorts of answer. The first is evolutionary: when and where human banter was first heard. The second is ontological: how an individual human acquires the power of speech and understanding. This week, by a neat coincidence, has seen the publication of papers addressing both of these conundrums.

The pilcrow is not just some typographic curiosity, useful only for livening up a coffee-table book on graphic design or pointing the way to a paragraph in a mortgage deed, but a living, breathing character with its roots in the earliest days of punctuation. Born in ancient Rome, refined in medieval scriptoria, appropriated by England’s most famous modern typographer and finally rehabilitated by the personal computer, the story of the pilcrow is intertwined with the evolution of modern writing. It is the quintessential shady character.

While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious writings ever found – penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands – a research team at the UA solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?

polib is a library to manipulate, create, modify gettext files (pot, po and mo files). You can load existing files, iterate through it's entries, add, modify entries, comments or metadata, etc... or create new po files from scratch.

polib is pretty stable now and is used by many opensource projects.

Pimsleur Language Programs are for anyone interested in learning a language. And because every learner's needs are different, we offer our programs with multiple options, so you can get a taste of the language, prepare for a trip, or go for in-depth learning and spoken proficiency.

Japandict is an online Japanese dictionary aimed to be one of the most complete and userfriendly on the Internet. It uses the publicly available data on which most online Japanese dictionaries are based on, but it's trying to show all the information in a much friendlier way.

Denshi Jisho is an easy-to-use and powerful online Japanese dictionary. It lets you find words, kanji and example sentences by searching in many ways.

The dictionaries are also interlinked so that you can check what the kanji in a word mean individually or what context a word can be used in. You can also look up kanji by the parts they contain.

The data is publicly available and comes from the excellent WWWJDIC project.

Welcome to Tangorin Online Japanese–English Dictionary consisting of five main glossaries with over 1,000,000 entries and 150,000 example sentences that you can search through using English, Japanese, hiragana, katakana, kanji, rōmaji or romanized Japanese.

Welcome to Nihongodict, a free online English ⇆ Japanese dictionary.

To get started, type a word in English or Japanese (any script, including romaji) in the box above.

The JLPT Study Page is a resource of study materials for JLPT Levels N5 to N2.

I set out to take my first JLPT exam in 2004 and although some information about JLPT exams was available on the internet, the information was never organised in a way that was useful to me.

Importantly, I was never quite sure what was in the official list or whether an official list even existed.

So, despite being void of artistic talent, I decided to create the sort of web site I was originally hoping to find. I wanted all the lists: Kanji, Vocab and especially Grammar I also wanted the lists to be up to date - since a lot of JLPT requirements were updated in 2002.