By Steven Horowitz, with helpful contributions from the JET alumni community and from jetsetjapan.com

In the beginning, the God of Japanese Language Study (”GOJLS”) made textbooks and kanji dictionaries. And they were good. Lo, then GOJLS saw that all those books were heavy and made the Canon WordTank, and it was even better. But the people were easily distracted with instant messaging, YouTube and Facebook, and GOJLS got all meta and created on-line Japanese study methods and dictionaries. And they were better still. (Though the WordTank is still pretty darn handy.)

So let’s stop now and take a look at what GOJLS hath wrought. At least before it all goes the way of the kanji dictionary.

YAPPR.COM

This rather addictive site offers short YouTube-like clips of pop culture in English with simultaneous, bilingual translation running on the side with occasional cultural commentary.

Though intended more for people interested in learning English, it’s also an excellent tool for studying Japanese. And while you’re there you can work on your Chinese and Spanish as well, with more languages to come.

Part of what makes it so attractive is the simplicity—you go to the site, see a bunch of videos and just click one to start. Another nice quality is that you’re so busy being entertained by the videos, you don’t even feel like you’re studying. And while you could inadvertently spend a large chunk of time on the site, it also makes it convenient to squeeze in bite-sized study portions at any point throughout your day at work.

Yappr.com is the brainchild of Patrick Nee, a graduate of MIT who studied at the Tokyo Institute of Technology where he admittedly associated with a number of JETs. While in Japan he met his Italian wife, and since leaving Japan has had to adapt to living in Italy as well. In his struggles to gain fluency in both Japanese and Italian, he observed (as did many of us) that watching TV was one of the best ways to improve language ability. And yet, following talk on TV can be very difficult and frustrating until you reach a certain level. The site evolved as the bridge to help the non-advanced take fuller advantage of TV as a learning tool.

Additionally, according to Patrick and his partner B.J. Greenspan, a bigger-picture goal is to set up a wiki-style translation community, where videos are posted and the community has the opportunity to provide translations.

Go take a spin on yappr.com for yourself, and stay tuned for future developments.

 

JAPANESEPOD101.COM

While Yappr.com is a wonderful tool for casual and entertaining study by those of us with at least basic Japanese ability, JapanesePod101 is perhaps the gold standard for comprehensive Japanese study online and the website recommended by most JET alums I spoke to.

It offers a prodigious number of beginner, intermediate, and advanced lessons for free in podcast form, much like ChinesePod.com, which I used this past year to start learning Chinese. (FYI, as far as I can tell the two companies are unrelated.) For $5/month you get access to the PDFs of the lesson notes which enable you follow along while you listen, and for $15/month you get full access to the site including PDFs of the transcripts. In my experience, you need the printed materials to get the full benefit, so it’s probably safe to assume that the $15 is the option most users will choose.

Cost saving tip: I signed up, in the name of journalistic research, for the free service with no intention of upgrading. Each day for the next week, however, I received an enthusiastic e-mail from owner Peter Gallante offering me a better and better deal, right up until the final hours before the offer expired.

Hi Steven,
I seem to have touched a nerve…
In my last email I asked why you hadn’t upgraded
your membership at JapanesePod101.com to Premium
yet. I understood that you may have just been too
busy with life, but I wanted to make sure you
extended your membership before your free trial is
up (it ends the day after tomorrow!)….

“Heck yes, I’ve been busy, Peter!” I responded. “I’m trying to write this review while pulling the Newsletter together!” Undeterred, however, Peter attempted greater intimacy with me.

Hi Steven,
I’ve got a confession to make…
Before when I told you about JapanesePod101.com, I
shared everything that our Premium membership has
to offer. I did this because I truly believe that
this is the BEST way to master Japanese fast….

I had a confession to make as well. “Hi, Peter. I really just signed up so I could write a review of your site.”

Anyway, I assume these e-mails are automatically generated (I know my responses were) and Peter is not sitting up late at night working on just the right wording for me alone, so I encourage you to play a game of chicken until the last second to get the best possible deal.

Like yappr.com, JapanesePod101.com distinguishes itself with the simplicity of its interface. You go to the site and you quickly understand your options (unlike some other sites reviewed here). Sign up. Download podcats. Take a tour. Study kanji. Beginner. Intermediate, etc.

The podcasts are entertaining, useful and straightforward. Also, one of the gripes I had with ChinesePod doesn’t seem to be a problem here—a 15-second introduction to each podcast that becomes rather redundant and irritating. Another nice feature, the JapanesePod101 site is flexible enough to enable a user to organize his or her study in whatever manner is most convenient. Focus on listening, speaking (they have a feature that lets you record your own voice and listen to it), vocabulary, kanji (you can “bank” your kanji and vocabulary and go back to them later in flashcard format) and/or writing. There’s also some great testing options, including prep for all levels of the Japanese Proficiency Tests.

They even began offering a feature that enables you to download the transcripts to your iPod so you can read the text on your screen, eliminating the need to bring printouts with you on the train.

There are too many features to thoroughly describe them all here, and I’m not about to shell out money to study more Japanese, because my days of intensive Japanese study are behind me. But given the similarity to ChinesePod, if I someone held a kendo stick to my head and said I have to study for the Japanese Proficiency Test (and I can’t sign up for classes at Japan Society), JapanesePod101.com would be my method of choice.

[Editor's note: The next few sites reviewed were found on jetsetjapan.com. Just prior to publication, we received word from them that the jetsetjapan.com website is a bit out of date and will be overhauled soon. So take the reviews with a grain of salt, onegaishimasu. And stay tuned for a feature article on the updated jetsetjapan.com in the Spring 2008 issue of the Newsletter, due out in April.]

 

TALKSUSHI.COM

Talksushi.com is listed on jetsetjapan.com under the name “Learn Japanese Online Fast.” The non-commital comment turns out to be telling: “Improve your Japanese with streaming audio and video lessons.”

The black background with red writing is also telling, hinting at a certain cynicism (which I inferred using my powers of pop psychology). The creator fulfills this expectation by mixing links to basic Japanese and kanji lessons with jaded commentary on topics such as Teaching English, Hot Japanese Girls, Japanese Whaling and Japanese Love (”After living in Japan for ten years now I have come to the final realization and understanding that the majority of Japanese don’t or can’t love.”)

Ten years indeed.

Like another site reviewed below, I could learn some Japanese from this site if I had to, but I don’t recommend it. The site uses a combination of charts, explanations and short homemade videos, including a promise that nice Japanese girls will be teaching you Japanese through the videos. And the content of the lessons is fine, I suppose. But too much digging around to find to what you’re looking for if you’re interested in actually studying. On the other hand, if you’re looking for one more jaded gaijin to “tell you what,” then maybe this is a good site for you.

 

LEARN-JAPANESE-RIGHT-NOW.COM

It’s listed on jetsetjapan.com under the heading “Learn Japanese Free” with the comment “Learn Japanese free. New free lessons added every day. No strings attached!” But new management must have taken over, because the site that popped up was called Learn Japanese Right Now.

I knew I was in trouble when the first line of text says, “Attention: If you want to effortlessly speak Japanese…this may be the most important letter you ever read.” Yowza.

After using extremely large text to pose the important question, “Who Else Wants to Effortlessly Quickly and Easily From Your Home Computer?”, a man named David McGimpsey offers a lengthy and narcissistic blog of a sales pitch that tells a third-person story of an “average Joe thrown into the middle of Osaka, Japan and forced [at gunpoint?] to memorize 2 Japanese alphabets and 100s of vocabulary in just days…while working full time!”

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I’d hired a team of striking writers.

How does he do it? Why of course with a software download called “Bullet Japanese”—basically online flashcards with pictures—that he created for his own study but now wants to share with you. And if you’re still not sold, well, he offers you “My 100% Satisfaction Guarantee!”

The real takeaway from this site is a fascinating anthropological perspective on how people market themselves. In fact, if you click on the affiliates section at the very bottom, Mr. McGimpsey offers you a chance to get in on this pyramid scheme—er, I mean sales opportunity for you to earn 75% commission on every sale. He even provides a series of tools such as a pre-written e-mail (”Hey [name], how is your Japanese study going? Mine was grinding to a halt, then I discovered a method that lets you…”). Fortunately, most of us don’t actually have friends that write like that. Nor will most of us end up using “Learn Japanese Right Now.”

Another site that’s low on educational value, high on entertainment value.

 

LEARN JAPANESE NET (www.learn-japanese.net)

Listed on jetsetjapan.com as a “comprehensive site with a well structured and practical approach to learning the language,” I found the site to be a little confusing upon arrival, particularly since it was sporting the mid-1990s database look. There were a few postings on the homepage from various people that seemed interested in learning, but if I’m going there to learn for myself, frankly I’m not really interested in the hopes, desires and issues of their Japanese-less souls.

I decided to click on the menu links on the left that listed the following categories. The Beginner’s Corner was promising, listing a slew of lessons, though the format included written Japanese that would have scared me off back in the days when I couldn’t decipher any Japanese.

As I moved on to Intermediate and Advanced, however, there were no lessons, only drop-down menus offering me a chance to search through threads. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m working under a deadline and was feeling a bit impatient, but I wasn’t able to track down any lessons in these categories. The other categories were similarly bare.

 

 

Perhaps this is a somewhat abandoned website that was started with good intentions but passed its peak a while back and I just stumbled onto the remnants, kind of like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. I’m sure I could extract some study value out of this if it were my only option, but there are better sites out there and it didn’t seem prudent to expend any more effort on this one. If you happen to be a fan of the site and I missed something, please let me know.

LEARN JAPANESE LANGUAGE (www.learn-japanese-kanji-hiragana-katakana.com

Another barely useful Japanese study site created by some guy named Mr. Takanori, promising “you will get immensely satisfying results FAST…”

There are some basic lessons intended to pull you in, but they want your contact info so they can send you seven days’ worth of free lessons via e-mail before charging you some amount that I couldn’t determine from digging around the website. For entertainment value, however, I do recommend the testimonials which more than likely were written by Mr. Takanori himself given the comical use of English.

 

MYHAPPYPLANET.COM & FRIENDSTER

Here are two other creative ways to study or improve your Japanese online. Friendster (if anyone still uses it) recently sent me an e-mail to let me know I can invite my Japanese and Korean friends to join my network. Potentially more interesting is MyHappyPlanet.com, which aspires to be a Friendster or Facebook for language learning, offering the tagline “Learn a language. Make friends. Have fun.” Although the last time I went to the site I was informed it’s in “closed beta” and was invited to submit my name and e-mail address so I can be notified as to when I can join the club. (Needless to say, I did so in the name of journalistic research.)

In my experience, however, I found (as many of you probably did as well) that language exchanges never worked out too well since I felt silly struggling to speak Japanese to someone once I knew their English was better than my Japanese, or alternatively, I felt frustrated listening to someone struggling to communicate with me in English when we could have more easily been conversing in Japanese.

But as the saying goes, “Ju nin to iro” (Ten people ten colors), in which case maybe this will appeal to certain folks out there.

 

FRANCIS BRITTO’S JAPANESE WEBLAB

A late addition to this article, so no time to review thoroughly. But essentially a comprehensive resource for Japanese study with links to various other sites broken into categories such as Pronunciation, Conversation, Listening, Grammar, Writing, Quizzes, Kana & Kanji, Reading, Various Skills (e.g., Teach Yourself Japanese), Vocabulary, Dictionaries, and Resources. Interestingly, Japanesepod101.com is nowhere to be found on the page. Perhaps the site is only interested in free study options?

In any event, this clearly should have been one of my first stops in doing research for this review. Then again, I have to admit it was much more fun reviewing some of the wack-job sites.

 

ON-LINE DICTIONARIES

I rarely use Japanese-English dictionaries. Not because I know every word out there, mind you. I just don’t have occasion to use them.

So with that disclaimer, I’ll leave you with recommendations from some experts from the JET alum community, including Stacy Smith (professional translator/interpreter), Scott Alprin (trademark lawyer to many a Japanese company) and El Presidente Rob Tuck (Ph.d candidate in Japanese literature at Columbia):

• http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch (Yahoo dictionary, Japanese-to-Japanese)

• http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?9C (Japanese dictionary geared toward foreigners; can search kanji by radical, etc.)

• http://www.alc.co.jp/ (Amazing Japanese dictionary geared toward Japanese; incredibly extensive examples but some use stilted English expressions)

• http://rnnnews.jp/ (Really useful dictionary that breaks down words into categories; e.g., economic, medical, law, energy. Useful for studying specific topics)

• www.kantango.com (Lets you make online flashcards)

• www.mlcjapanese.co.jp (Courtesy of The Meguro Language Center, which has self-study materials for all levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.)

• www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~mohso/kyozai98/KANJI/top.htm (Test your kanji knowledge)

• www.kanjiclinic.com (By Mary Noguchi)

Do you know of some better sites for studying Japanese? Have comments on the ones reviewed here? Share your comments and thoughts below.