Nihongo ga daisuki desu ne?

The Japanese Word-processing program is called JWP, and it is 100% freeware. It's a dream come true. It runs on a plain-English, Windows operating system and even runs fine as low as a 386. It has takes up 10 - 12 MB of your hard disk; about 2/3 of that is all resource files for kana to kanji converion, the built-in Japanese/English dictionary, the kanji information database including on-yomi, kun-yomi, and english readings as well as many statistics and references, and indexes to kanji by stroke count, or radicals. It even has a top-notch help file.

One of my favorite features is that it comes with small, medium, and large fonts. That's a blessing! after using an old program at school that only had the tiny font (almost illegible to most non-natives!).

This program rivals commercial programs that sell for $200, $500 or more. Its dictionary is actually better than that of many commercial programs, and it isn't missing any powerfully important features. The only potential drawbacks are that it uses bitmapped fonts (instead of TrueType, but those are not free), and that at the moment it doesn't support things like bold and italic. It does support vertical printing, however.

JWP can also read and save files in any Japanese encoding system, so you can even use it to view Japanese web pages, e-mail, etc., just by saving them and then loading them up in JWP.

I have found JWP to be an invaluable resource in learning and exploring Japanese because it gives me instant access to kanji and information about how the kanji is used, and all sorts of other things. It makes this sort of exploring-learning much faster than the traditional stack-of-dictionaries plus painstaking-stroke-countring, and you don't need a magnifying glass!

Since it is freeware the author never thought to write an installation program. It is not immediately apparent to a first-time user how to get the program set up, but it's not that hard. To get JWP, you need to get about 9 or about 10 zip files from a JWP distribution site. JWP is divided into many files so that you won't have to download all 5 megabytes again if you want to upgrade, e.g. so you can get just the dictionary when it is updated. If you have Windows 95, get the extra file for the 32-bit version as well.

Last I checked, the current version was 1.3. So, go to one of the following FTP sites, and grab all the files that start with jwp13:

You'll be downloading a lot, so do it sometime when net traffic is minimal, like early morning. Also, it is easier if you can use an ftp program that lets you select multiple files to download all at once, since it will be pretty boring sitting there clicking on one file after the other with half an hour in between.

Next, make sure all the files are in the directory you want to install the program in, and unzip them all. Then you can delete the .zip files. Run makeini.exe to create an initialization file, and JWP is ready to go! Once in JWP, learn to use F4 and when to type capitals, then try F6, Ctrl+K, and maybe even Ctrl+L. That should be ample introduction to get you hooked.

Good luck!

Also of interest may be the Shodouka Launchpad. It will take a Japanese-encoded page and render each character string as a graphic and display it in your web browser. It even changes all the links in the page to go through Shodouka too!