Essential Touch's response:

> Software:
> well more configuration than recommendation really. I've got quite a
> few teaching apps that are great, the problem is with email,
> newsgroups, web etc. I keep my font size as small as possible to avoid
> taking up too much screen space, this is fine for English but a bit
> crap for the squiggles I am not used to that make up Japanese. Is
> there any way to have English at it's current size and Japanese much
> larger until I'm better at recognizing the characters? I'm on XP by
> the way. 

I'm not entirely sure that's possible.  You may just have to resort to 
Display properties > Appearance > Font size... when you need to go from 
normal to large.

Otherwise, you could consider making the default extra large, then 
configuring your individual applications to use smaller fonts.  I believe 
that should work.  In your browser, at least in Firefox, increasing and 
decreasing font size on the fly is a simple matter of CTRL+scroll wheel 
up and down.

And for the record (well, for me anyway), what teaching applications do 
you have that you are learning from?

-- 
-Lost
Remove the extra words to reply by e-mail.  Don't e-mail me.  I am 
kidding.  No I am not.