Japanese fonts

[Uncle Frank]

I notice on this forum site a lot of the information is in the Japanese characters (Kangi etc.). Is there a download I can put in my computer to be able to read everything in English ?
I guess I can dig out my 30 year old Japanese text books and try to translate but I would die of old age by the time I got through a single sentence!
Maybe the idea is to make it so only those who read Japanese can understand the messages and it is is not my earned right to be able to do so.
I feel like I am missing out on a lot of interesting knowledge by not being able to read everything.
Is there an easy solution or should I start studying?

[Elizabeth]

Frank,
Of course you should study, too, but here are some references re: automated translation sites & software etc if you can get the fonts to display correctly and just want to run it through one of those for a quick and dirty feel of the subject matter. Don't worry about missing out on much knowledge here, though. Some of the threads are lessons or discussions of the language, but mostly it is people talking about their personal lives. Feel free to ask if you're looking for something in particular or have questions about any of them!

http://langsupport.japanreference.com/translation.shtml

[ax]

I used the babylon free ja-en-ja dictionary, I kinda get the feel of japanese sentence structure though not very proficiently and that Ctrl+mouseclick on Babylon translator really did a good job in helping me deciphering the monstrous japanese.

ax