Monthly Archives: December 2012

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JLR: Hiragana Times and Glomaji

Hiragana Times:

This is a paid bilingual newspaper subscription website. What I like about this website is that each article is written in English, Japanese (with furigana above kanji, kana and romaji). There is audio if you pay for it. I think that this is a great resource if you want to pay for it. I do not use this website.

Glomaji:

This is a new website created by Hiragana Times. It’s an international community, where you can practice your Japanese with both native and non-native speakers/students of Japanese. This website uses romaji. I do not use this website, because romaji can become a handicap when you want to learn Japanese, but I like the concept.

Resources:

Hiragana Times | ひらがなタイムズ “The best Japanese learning magazine”

http://www.glomaji.com/index.html

 

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JLR: TuneIn Radio

TuneIn Radio is a world radio iPhone app and website. Using the radio is a good way to practice listening comprehension.

Things I like about TuneIn Radio:

  • Recording features on the paid version of the app
  • Radio, podcasts, audiobooks from all around the world
  • Browse by language, location
  • Search feature
  • Favorite stations
  • Recommend Feature

Things I dislike:

  • Advertisements on the free version of the app, but you can buy the paid version for a dollar (TuneIn Radio Pro)
  • Sometimes radio stations do not work

Conclusion:

This is a good way to practice listening to real Japanese. I would recommend it.

Resources:

http://tunein.com/

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JLR: Surviving in Japan

I found this website through Tokyo Podcast (I put the link below). Surviving in Japan is primarily a blog to help foreigners living in Japan with problems they may encounter living in Japan. I listed this as a Japanese learning resource, because the author of this website includes vocabulary lists in some of the posts.

Resources:

http://www.survivingnjapan.com/

Tokyo Podcast

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JLR: Japanese Class

I previously wrote a post about learning Japanese on Twitter. One of the websites I found out about is Japanese class. It is a free website where you can study kanji, vocabulary and even practice reading in Japanese.

What I like:

  • It is free
  • Kanji lessons (stroke order, combinations, meanings)
  • Kana lessons
  • Practice
  • Readings (with furigana [small kana above kanji] and vocabulary list)
  • Experience points

What I dislike:

  • The advertisements
  • Attendance (It makes me feel guilty if I do not log in and practice to get.)

Conclusion:

It is a good website.

Resources:

http://JapaneseClass.jp/

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JLR: Kana de Manga

Kana de Manga has sentimental value to me. It was the first real Japanese learning book I used when I began trying to learn Japanese by myself in middle school.

What I like:

  • It covers hiragana and katakana.
  • It gives you a good overview of what the difference between hiragana and katakana are at the beginning of the book.
  • It has pages full of practice boxes at the end of the book.
  • It teaches you stroke order and random Japanese words.
  • It has a hiragana and katakana chart.
  • It explains the dakuten and handakuten.
  • It explains the small tsu (つ・ツ) used in both kana alphabets and the dashes (ー) used in katakana.

What I do not like:

  • It does not explain kana completely. (All the specifics are below.)
  • It does not explain why sometimes there is a small tsu (つ) at the end of sentences or phrases in comic books (manga).
  • It does not explain particles (the fact you use hiragana for them in writing).
  • It does not include an explanation or chart of contracted/compound sounds (the i [い] line/sounds used with ya [や・ヤ], yu [ゆ・ユ], and yo [よ・ヨ])
  • It does not explain that characters appear differently depending on what type of script they are being written in.

My conclusion:

It is a good starting point, but you should use other material such as a textbook in order to understand kana better.

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JLR: Tae Kim’s Learning Japanese Guide

Whenever I am confused about grammar, this is usually one of the first places I look. Tae Kim’s Learning Japanese Guide is an iPhone app and a website. I will be reviewing the app, since I do not usually go to the website, but I think the information on both are the same.

What I like:

  • It is free.
  • It explains the Japanese writing system, including a lot of things that confuse beginners such as the small tsu (つ).
  • It covers most of the grammar you learn in school.
  • There are examples and conjugation charts.
  • Links to other websites are provided.

My conclusion:

This is great for reference. It does not cover everything you may want to look up, but it is good supplemental material to a Japanese language learning textbook or program.

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JLR: Learn Japanese with Twitter

If you are learning Japanese, it is a good idea to have a Twitter account.

Why use Twitter to study Japanese:

  • If you are following someone who posts in Japanese, you can use that as good, short reading comprehension practice.
  • You can find accounts that teach kanji, give language learning advice or websites for learning Japanese that you most likely would not have heard about otherwise.
  • You can see other people learning Japanese and realize that the things that confuse you most likely confuse everyone else learning Japanese.
  • You can ask other people on Twitter your language questions.

How to use Twitter to study Japanese:

  • Follow Japanese learning websites, bloggers etc. if you want updates on when they update (you technically could use an RSS reader for this) or for quick Japanese lessons.
  • Follow other people learning Japanese.
  • Follow people who already know Japanese (native speakers and non-native speakers).
  • Follow Japanese related pages/accounts and other Japanese related Twitter accounts will follow you

My conclusion:

Twitter is a good networking website and can be used to further your language studies.

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A plan

I have been set on become a teacher for a while now. The next three months is giving me the opportunity to practice being a teacher on myself. In preparation, I looked at how my previous language teachers organized their syllabi. What I took from that was making a table with an outline of what I would be doing every day.

While that may not sound impressive, it is significant to me. I need organization. I need to have some kind of plan and a goal in mind. When I began studying Japanese, I started using various websites on the Internet and some Kanji de Manga books I had found at a bookstore. I did not have any plan and only focused on trying to memorize what was in the books. I did not retain anything no matter how much I studied, or rather no matter how much I thought I was studying. Therefore, I could not produce anything I “learned”.

I am not saying it was a total failure, because I learned a lot of important lessons from those experiences, which I am only now appreciating. All of that work helped me when I took Japanese 101 in college, because I could already (pretty much) read kana, which consist of two phonetic alphabets (there are other ways to describe this) and it made my first Japanese class that much easier.

I think two of the most important things any foreign language student should have is enthusiasm and consistency. I was very enthusiastic about learning Japanese during my first Japanese course and I was constantly looking for more ways to improve and resources to supplement my Japanese class. Thus, I did well in the class.

In order to make the next three months productive, I am currently devising an action plan.

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JLR: Learning Japanese with Mango

Mango Languages is a company that sells their online foreign language learning software to individuals, businesses (I assume) and…libraries. If you live in a certain areas, your public library may have a Mango language subscription that you can access for free with your public library card.

I get the impression that the library subscription and individual subscriptions are different. With the library subscription you do not get all of the levels of the language you are studying, which you could buy with an individual subscription, but you do get a wide variety of foreign languages to study with the library subscription.

Resources:

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