Online Resources for Japanese Language Learning (SharedTalk, Rikai.com, 10,000 Sentences)

The last post provided a couple of applications to start bringing your Japanese learning into reality, with a useful SRS application to review kanji, and a web-based application to help build word power. This article shares both more ways of bringing your Japanese learning into the realistic domain, and introduces an application to help you read real Japanese on the web, either in email, or on web pages.

Sharedtalk

Chat programmes provide a great way to start putting your learning into practice. Despite putting a lot of effort into studying, it can still be quite scary to enter realistic situations with Japanese, and the endless possibilities that you can encounter in “the wild” with the language. To start with, it can be useful to start practicing via chat programmes, as this both gives you time to consider a response, and also allows you to look up words you don’t understand, providing the chance to have realistic conversation, even at a lower-intermediate level. Even at higher levels MSN is useful as a way of increasing reading speed and word power, with less of a danger of miscommunication.

Sharedtalk is a site that provides both a chat client, as well as a “meeting place” for language exchange. Language exchange is the process of two or more people meeting each other, with the aim of sharing their native languages and getting the chance to speak with someone who uses another language. Usually, the people who take part in language exchange are in the same boat as you, and are pretty tolerant of your language ability, no matter how rough it might be. However, it is important to match with someone of a similar language level to yourself, otherwise you might find yourself only speaking your own native language! Sharedtalk isn’t the only language exchange site out there, but being free, and providing a nice interface, it`s definitely one of the best.

Rikaichan

Rikaichan is a pop-up dictionary plug-in for FireFox, and is quite simply indispensable to the Japanese learner who is yet to have an extensive vocabulary, or even for the experienced learner who doesn’t wish to disturb the flow of his web-based reading with opening up other applications or looking in paper dictionaries. With this plug-in, when viewing a web page through FireFox, as you hover over any Japanese text with your cursor, Rikaichan will select any possible combinations of words it detects on the cursor, and pops up in a blue box possible dictionary definitions of the selection. This allows the user, with a decent understanding of Japanese grammar, to read almost anything put in front of him, even with quite a low level of vocabulary. Forward emails to gmail, or documents to google docs, and you can also read them with Rikaichan through FireFox.

“10,000 Sentences”

10,000 Sentences is a method advocated by Khatzumoto of AJATT for learning grammar, vocabulary, and everything else all at once, rather than trying to learn it in bits, like most books advocate. The thinking behind this is is that the rules of grammar, all the bits that put a sentence together, are far too difficult to learn in isolation, and the problems contrived to teach the points are usually unrealistic and lead to stilted Japanese. Rather than taking this traditional approach, if you can gather 10,000 sentences of information that you are personally INTERESTED in, and want to understand, and if you bombard yourself with enough of it, eventually, the grammar, the words, everything will start to sink in as a whole, and natural Japanese will result. Being interested in the content is important for motivation; choose boring stuff, and the brain will shut it out.

Again, 10,000 sentences is a technique that has a great marriage with Anki, which takes the effort out of scheduling the reviews yourself, and keeps your learning efficient. Plenty of sentence packs are available through the Anki software to start you on your way.

In the next blog post, ways of studying Japanese on the move with the iPhone will be discussed. Good luck gathering and learning 10,000 sentences, and don’t forget to download Rikaichan to help with your reading!