eating cucumbers without permission...

Fantastic collection from the "International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting", including scans of old 19th-Century school texts. My school failed to adequately teach cursive, but I always wanted to learn...

"...the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain."

They don't seem to be blocking access by IP range (yet?), but it's explicitly for students/staff only. Pity: random lectures are always fun listening.

The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, "Hi, my name is Smith," but they don't tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. [...] In fact, the most common way to say something like "My name is Smith" in Japanese is to say "am Smith". [...] But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they're too busy trying to push you out the door with "useful" phrases right off the bat.

RikaiXUL is a plugin version of the Japanese Reading function of rikai.com. In runs in (and requires) the Firefox browser.

That is, mouseover kanji to get English and hiragana translations, plus radicals. It's too cool.

Mouseover a character and get a tooltip with magnification and English translation. It's fantastic as a learning tool -- I wish there were sites like it in the language(s) I'm studying in my spare time.