Now you can take shogi class on YouTube. The author HIDETCHI has created an impressive archive of YouTube video clips for Shogi fans. Enjoy!

The explosion of YouTube popularity means there are more YouTube channels related to Shogi.Please see "Shogi in YouTube" page for more info.

In Early 2024, Shogi Instructor Yasuhi Ishikawa has started Shogi lesson course in English using Vimeo on Demand video service. You need to subscribe with monthly payment of $7/mo (as of December 2024) but opportunity of getting lessons in English from Shogi lesson pro is so rare for Shogi fan abroad so I have to mention this service. This may be just what you need (for money)

Blog articles for Shogi beginners by Children's Shogi School in Japan

The site posts various shogi information such as news of Shogi professionals, Shogi history, Shogi opening and tactics.

Several blog entries by Seigo Sato, who is publishing English Shogi books in Amazon.co.jp

There is a forum page in 81 dojo server (see below) for exchanging news and information among shogi fans. about shogi, join the forum and ask.

This one seems to have started around 2020 but have tons of contents and sub-channels. I only read messaging sections but Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform, so it appears it can be used for realtime gaming room chats and live video streaming.

Unsurprisingly, Reddit does have Shogi channel which boasts 6.5k members

Make sure your computer can display Japanese characters. All modern operating systems supports Asian Characters.

Modern Browser, such as Chrome and Edge has settings for automatically translating pages in particular language. Look for Settings section of your Browser. It does a good job of translating Japanese in general topics but usually have difficulity translating Shogi specific idioms and game notations.

Get a little help on understanding a meaning of that Japanese text. Variant of Rikaichan (which exists in all browser extensions) will show translated Japanese text when mouse pointer is hovered over the word. You might like this approach better than Browser translating entire page.

If you don't have any negative feeling about use of AI, then it can be used as a supersharged translator. Prompting is a tricky part. Use some phrases that tells it that you want Japanese text translated in context of Shogi. For instance, the following prompt is known to work very well in kyokumen.jp

Please translate the below Japanese text about game of Shogi into English. Note that these words that follows ☗ and ☖ are Shogi move notation

Exhaustive Japanese vocabulary library relating to Shogi. As normal words used in Shogi sometimes have definitive meaning, this is very handy for word reference. An amazing product of love by one individual.

Link here is for ChessVariantDotCom. Refer to the explanation on that site.  The app here plays all kinds of chess variant, including Shogi. There are many options you can set to configure the look and feel of the program. It also comes with shogi engine called Spear so that you can evaluate your game.

These are GUIs and Engines talks to each other using USI protocol.   BCM Games supports more communication protocol to support other board game, but it uses USI to communicate to  Spear engine.  We will discuss more of those applications in this subpage.  Please check them out!

If you dont need AI engine but needs a light-weight zippy program, Kakinoki software provides kifu viewers for both Windows and Mac platforms. Mr.Kakinoki is a creator of KIF/KIFU format which is now used on variety of software and now a de facto standard for computer Kifu records. Others notable formats are CSA and K2F. These viewer read all of them and comes with rich set of utilities. Use the link below to download the program.

This is an excellent AI program that you can use. The same program is available as a smartphone app, but the link below is for a web browser version. Unfortunately the interface is all in Japanese so there will be some getting used to. There is a quick English introduction in Sato Seigo's blog page (Link below)

Practice your shogi skills using on-line shogi program. This app uses JavaScript, so it is not suffered from the lack of flash programming support in recent browsers. The site contains nominal amount of English,so you could probably get to 'Play' games with various AI with varying strength and weaknesses. Second link explains how to navigate and play against the Shogi engine on this site.

This is a webGL version that runs on your browser of the same app that is popular in Android and IOS. (These smartphone apps might not be available in western world) Aside from playing against AI, it offers Checkmate problem from real games and also so called "勝ち切れ将棋(play until win)"　in which you start from the board where professional player actually resigned, then continue playing against AI until you checkmate the opponent king. If you want to polish endgame skill, this is a good exercise. AI's strength can be set from level 0 to level 6 with the level 6 being strongest.

Kifu(棋譜) is a standard notations for recording Shogi games. Huge amount of shogi records are available in Kifu. With this record, we can still access Shogi games played hundreds of years ago. Please see the How to read Kifu section of this site. If you are more of the auditory learner, then a YouTube video by Shogi House should help.

Shogi kifu databse in Japan. It boasts +800k Kifu records. Although it shows minimal amount of English text, navigation maybe a challenge. Browser extensions for Japanese support (see above) should help.

In Japanese. This is a search engine for any board position given either in SFEN or BOD format. It searches through not only kifu records, but also known Shogi book published. Once searched and corresponding data is found, the page shows favorability of the board and possible next move, also a list of past games played with the same position. It uses kifu records available from Shogi DB2, 81dojo.com and floodgate repositories. Apps such as 81dojo, PiyoShogi and ShogiGUI discussed in this page has a dicrect command to communicate with this site.
Hint. Shogi board used in shogishack site can copy SFEN records to clipboard by clicking the copy icon on top right corner. You can then paste this data into KyokumenPedia's SFEN box to search for more information. It also has a tree search based on Shogi strategy but navigation may be challenging for Non-Japanese speakers.

There is an easy to navigate English(French, actually) frontend to Shogi Kifu database. It is based on subset of snapshot from 将棋の棋譜でーたべーす on or around 2006~7. The source database site appeared to have closed down in 2016 (The link from shogi.free.fr doesn't go anywhere). However, this front-end site itself kept a record of 36,000+ Kifus to interactively study professional games. The site is no longer updated and interface is rudimentary but works. As such, records are bit dated but still provide you with a good foundation of Shogi plays. If you are interested in a particular system and want to know all the associated moves, visit this site and explore!

This on-line store ships from Japan, started by Ms. Madoka Kitao (hence the store name) who is a professional Shogi player.  They carry Shogi-equipments and books in various languages. Their Shogi book selections are pretty decent.