Rikaichan
 

Just a quick post.
For those of you using firefox I would really suggest downloading the rikaichan add-on.

When mousing over any single or compound Kanji it provides the meaning and kana reading.

I only just discovered it recently and I'm finding it to be quite helpful, so I figured I would share. :)

I've been using this for a while now and it's definetely a useful tool.

yeah.. I also strongly recommend those who are learning Japanese language to use this addons..

It can get easy to rely on it though, so if you're trying to learn Kanji readings or meanings, I'd suggest testing yourself once in a while before mousing over with Rikaichan. I do that and it's helped me to read some words (though because I never write them I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be able to write all of them by hand if I needed to).

That's why I think rikai.com is better. Instead of it just showing you the readings, you actually have to copy and paste the URL or text itself, load up rikai.com, paste, and have it do the same thing rikaichan does.

You'll find after a while, you'd rather work your way through it because it's just so tedious to do the above method with rikai.com. :)

I definitely felt like I was relying on it too much so now I always try to read on my own before I use rikaichan.

I have a friend who refused to buy a denshi jisho because he viewed it as a crutch that made him too lazy to force himself to memorize vocab. He used a paper dictionary, and his vocabulary was unbelievably excellent for having only studied two years. He probably could have passed the JLPT1 vocabulary sections. I was in awe.