Last updated: 4-21-13
Here is a page of links that I’ve found related to learning Japanese.
- V2K Japan – A new blog written by three friends who want to share Japanese culture, language and products.
- fengyunzhibo.com - The site is in Chinese, but there are many, many streams of Japanese television here.
- Remembering the Kanji (Vol. 1) by James W. Heisig – This book teaches the over 2,000 general-use Kanji. It’s divided into lessons, and begins with “primative” kanji first, building up to the more complex kanji.
- All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) – This site is one of my main guidelines for teaching myself Japanese. It does not teach Japanese, but teaches a way to learn Japanese, or in the poster’s words, become Japanese. I follow this closely, but there are a few deviations I’m making to make it work for me. Either way, it’s a great site.
Raziko for Android – this is a great app that allows you to listen to Japanese radio. Even if you don’t understand what you are listening to, listen anyway. It will eventually pay off, an you’ll start understanding parts of it down the road.UPDATE: This no longer works outside of Japan. Turns out it was only made available temporarily after the 2011 tsunami, which is when this page was written.
- JED – Japanese-English Dictionary for Android – Having one of these is quintessential to learning any language. This one has advanced search features allowing you to search by English or Japanese. It gives you the results in Kanji or Kana (or both if it applies), as well as in Romaji so you know how to pronounce it.
- Kana Table – Displays the common hirigana and katakana in one place. I looked for a text based one all over the net, and was unable to find a nice one, so I made one. Now printer friendly!
- Rikaichan – A FireFox plugin (Rikaikun is also available for Chrome) that acts as a Japanese dictionary when you hover over kanji or kana. Very useful for all those Japanese web sites.
- Reviewing the Kanji – A useful SRS tool that helps review/retain Kanji/Kana/Whatever. Matches up with the book so you don’t have to key in the Kanji.
- last.fm – Has a very wide variety of Japanese music to choose from. A bit like Pandora (which unfortunately doesn’t have much Japanese music).
- Google 日本語 – No more searches in English! Japanese search only! A simple change of URL will help with immersion.
- Installing and Typing Japanese on Vista / Windows 7 (YesJapan) – How to install and type in the language for Windows Vista and 7.
- Japanese Input on Windows XP – Same as above, but for Windows XP.
- Japanese Input on Mac – Same as above, but for Mac.
- FNN News – A great resource for reading and listening to the news on complete Japanese.
- NHK World – Japanese Lessons – These are audio books with accompanying workbooks – 100 lessons free. They are good for some basic expressions.
- Yahoo! Mail Japan – Yep, might as well swap over to that Japanese email account as well.
- Japanese Playstation Manuals- The ones for the PocketStation, original Playstation and PSOne all include furigana!
- TBS Radio 954 Podcasts – Chock-full of downloadable Japanese talk show podcasts, in MP3 format. Literally dozens of hours worth.
- TuneIn – Japanese internet radio streams. Lots of stations to choose from.
- Grooveshark – Like Pandora, but you choose the tracks you want to listen to.
- Freshverse - Japanese TV stream. Free. Only one channel, but it’s in higher quality than anything else out there. UPDATE: Looks like this site is down for a while. The stream hasn’t functioned in over 6 months and no activity on the site since last year.
- サイマルラジオ (saimuru radio/simul radio) – Tons of Japanese radio stations to choose from, all in one place. Click the plus signs to open up a station.
- Tae Kim’s Blog – a blog with lots of helpful info on learning Japanese. Anyone trying to learn Japanese on their own would eventually stumble onto this. It’s like the rice of learning Japanese.
If there are any links you find useful and would like to see posted, please send me an email at torabisuburoman[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]jp.
Added some links and various updates.
I’m not sure what third year student means, or what your riadeng level is.However. I can say that textbooks for foreign language learners will only get you so far (and it’s not too far, IMHO). Eventually you will need to switch your learning method to a more permanent and open-ended thing, namely just consuming a lot of data and processing it as it comes in – once you have the basics down, there isn’t any real “order” to stuff. It’s more of a change in thought process, I suppose.And, this sort of “I’m still in a class but I’ve got extra time I want to use” situation might be the perfect time to start!
For that, what you need isn’t actual textbooks[1], but rather REFERENCE books. The minimum basic set you’ll need is:
(1) 国語辞典 (or if you still need it, 和英辞典) – this is where you look up words you know how to pronounce, in aiueo order. You might want to start with a 国語辞典 aimed at elementary students, or junior high students, at first – you can use it in parallel with a JE dictionary, and you can get used to how definitions work in Japanese. If you have the ability to browse, you should try to pick a dictionary that gives the part of speech (品詞) and example sentences for all words.
(2) 漢和辞典 – you need to learn how to look up characters in a regular character dictionary, by 部首 (part) and stroke count. This is where you will look up characters you can’t pronounce (or look up information on single characters, generally). When I was in school, we learned this starting in elementary third grade (but that was ages ago now). I can try to see if there are some good guides online, but if you look for 国語 resources aimed at that group, you can probably find something.
(3) 文型辞典 (sentence patterns dictionary) – This is the one most people don’t think of. But for second-language learners it’s really valuable. I can recommend highly a book 「日本語文型辞典」from くろしお出版。 This is where you’ll look up “glue pieces” like 「Xといい、Yといい」or 「Xしようにも」type stuff.So then, pick some riadeng source (which can be anything at all!) among all the regular riadeng you do, and fully digest it, looking up everything you don’t understand. Ideally you pick something where you can follow the story for at least a few pages only marking down the places to look up, and then look the stuff up at the end of the session. If that means comics, that’s fine. I would suggest then putting the new words you learn into some SRS, so you can review them. If you do, it’s very important to put example sentences into the SRS and really concentrate on being able to reproduce and remember those example sentences – the original sentence you found the word in, plus any from the dictionary you copy out (or google up). That way you remember the words in context, always. The nice thing about computerized flash cards is you can have more than two “sides” – so you can have the example sentences always show up with the “answer,” whether your prompt is the word (going one way) OR the definition (going the other).As you do more of these, you’ll want to vary the genre because the vocabulary used and writing style used varies by genre quite a bit. Alternate between fiction and not, or whatever.Is your teacher or TA someone who went through Japanese schools? If so, they can probably help with some advice on good lower school references to use when you’re first starting out. [1] In fact if you look at a lot of “advanced” textbooks for English-speaking college students, pretty much what they are is just predigested forms of this data gathering – they have old news articles from 2005 or whenever, with the new vocabulary and grammar patterns taken out and explained. Well, if you have your own references, you can do this on your own, and read CURRENT news articles where you’ll have the benefit of context (presuming you already read the news in your main language too).
I agree with this, and it is in fact very similar to my current process. I need to update this page again sometime soon with more links.
Thanks for your suggestions though!
These links are great! This will definitely help round out my immersion environment.
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