I'm heading to Japan in late July for the iCommons iSummit conference, and then hanging out in Tokyo for a bit. In order to prepare, I'll be trying to learn some Japanese.
I remember blogging in Spanish, Polish, and French a few years back, as a way to reinforce those languages. Unfortunately, Spanish was never really something that caught on, but the other two are doing fine. Now it's time to try and add Japanese to the list, and I'll document my progress on here.
To start, I bought Japanese Demystified. While books from stores aren't necessary (I love the idea of learning a language for free), I often find myself in coffee shops or trains, and it's good to have something in print.
Aside from that, I'm all up for trying free resources. I'll finally test out the Live Mocha Japanese lessons. Also, I'm looking forward to listening to a few podcasts. Doing a search yielded the following results:
- JapanCast
- JapanesePod101
- Learn Japanese with Beb and Alex
- World Nomads
- Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu's Podcast
In addition to the above, there are free dictionaries and Wikibooks.
I'm also curious about LingQ, but not sure how much of their content is free.
Edit: my friend Sacha posted a follow-up post on her blog with more resources. Thanks, Sacha!
Note: click on photo for credits.
1 comment:
I have some Japanese-related bookmarks on del.icio.us that you might find useful. =)
I particularly recommend this quick and dirty guide to Japanese, Jim Breen's WWWJDIC and the example sentence search. You can download the examples file from the FTP server for totally awesome local lookup. I wrote some code in Emacs to make this easier (and to insert random taglines into my blog posts =) ).
Good luck and have fun!
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