Nihongojouzu

Nihongo de kurasou

Via BigDaikon - at D-Addicts you can find bittorrents of the NHK series Nihongo de kurasou. Three NNSJ (a Chinese guy, Korean girl and Brazilian guy) chat with a kimono-clad Japanese teacher and follow the progress of a Japanese speaking Filipina living in Japan and married to a Japanese salariman. The series is broken into episodes with titles like "Expressing Displeasure" and "Consoling". Looks half decent.

LiveDictionary

Via the MacMinute web site comes a nifty Safari extension called LiveDictionary which adds dictionary look-ups to your browser. The trial version is fully operational for 10 days so I took it for a whirl. I selected the EDICT J-E and E-J dictionaries, set the J-E to default and went to visit the Yomiuri Shinbun website. I let the cursor hover over a kanji and a second later a window popped up with the furigana and English meaning. Excellent! It works like Rikai, but without the necessity of having to navigate to that website. Unlike Rikai which is free, after 10 days you have to cough up $25 to keep using LiveDictionary. Still, it looks like it may be worth it....