Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by CelticMom on March 22, 2011 at 8:03pm

Thanks, Eric, for posting these resources. As a long-time Japanese language learner whose dyslexic son is also learning Japanese language as a high school student, I'm always on the lookout for new resources.

Permalink Reply by Eric McCormick on March 22, 2011 at 9:27pm

I have tried several resources, and I never liked were James W. Heisig's Remebering the ... books.  They are widely popular, but I learned some real entomology with Len Walsh's Read Japanese Today, and Heisig picked his own way of doing what he saw.  Suddenly I had conflicting imagery and lost access to all my understanding for over a year.

A second reason I believe Heisig's choice is very bad is due to the psychology of linguistics. It has been proven that when you speak a different language, it changes thought processes, attitudes, and many other things. These can be minor or dramatic depending on the person and the language. As an example, the guy who runs J-List (a Japanese import site) talked about how his daughter is a tom-boy in Japanese, but exceptionally feminine in English! With changes that dramatic being possible, I feel people are working against themselves by not learning the Japanese picture associations. While these may be different from the Chinese origins, I do not know if they are or are not, they will certainly be visuals a Japanese person references internally, which will shape their thoughts and words. Therefore, a true understanding can not be reached by using Heisig's non-Japanese interpretation of the visual sub components that make up Kanji.

A formal class is a big thing when it comes to language learning, but a lot of people have been using Genki for self study.  They just came out with a new set of books.  The self study is supposed to be better because they are including a lot more audio. There are also minor modernizations to the text. Between a good text like that, the workbook for it, and a program like Anki to build vocabulary, people can get a long way.

The other two great resources I have are JapanesePod101, which can be free, and the Meguro Language Center of Tokyo, which gives away a ton of their material for free.

JP101 is a project started by a translation company that hos native English and Japanese speakers who speak the other language.  It got big enough that they hired a Japanese teacher to vet their lessons. If you subscribe, there is more you can do online. But there is a trick... use the trial or a one month subscription and download all their audio files and PDFs. Try out their online language lab, but if it is not enough to make you stay subscribed, just take the downloads and cancel.  It is literally hundreds of dollars worth of native speech with transcripts for like $20 for a 1 month subscription.

MLC is a school in Japan. They just hand out a lot of their materials for free and they are professional quality.  I use them as an augment to my Genki materials.  It gives me more sample sentences.

If either of these sites is down at the moment.... well... Japan has had some issues recently....

Oh, and White Rabit Press, who sells the books I linked earlier, has a ton of stuff by grade level.  That can be very important. However, the shipping from Japan can add up.