by the way, i’ll be moving over to http://japanesejapanese.com/ to study with mike smeen from kenkyuukai and david from earthcallingdavid. well, it’s just in draft stage at the moment.
the basic idea is to have a learning japanese group blog…. the more the merrier!
others can sign up, and mike will give you a wordpress username and you can post all you like.
in my language exchange with david yesterday, he gave me a compliment on my pronunciation joking that he thought it was a native speaker. i said ‘thank you’; but of course if i was a real japanese speaker i’d have demurred and said it was awful. surely, he was just being nice, but it was encouraging.
how do you really know if your pronunciation is good, if everyone’s aalways being so nice?
how about speech analysis? i haven’t tried this *yet*, but i’m going to:
Public speech analysis: PASTE. You email the sound to the server, and it spits out an analysis of your recorded audio. See pictures of the analysis here and here. I’m not sure how it works, but it looks like you compare your patterns with that of a native speaker.
this is so cool! can i get one of these in a portable version?
Voice of Japan is a Japanese text to speech machine. Voice of Japan generates voice from written texts. Lean back and listen to your Japanese text being read by a gentle female voice. Paste any Japanese text from websites, email or documents to the textbox and have it read with a superb near natural voice quality (voice demo here).
Japanese Text to Speech (TTS) Machine: Japanese Voice Generation.
it would be great if you could have it as a PDA, and then just type in some english, and have it speak for you… of course it doesn’t work the other way… all the developer needs is some voice-recognition, and auto-translate over into english!
sadly, it only works on windoze. 
hmm… right after i drafted this post, it occured to me… i suppose this isn’t really earth shattering, i mean, my mac can speak to me all day. but mine doesn’t speak japanese. (i’m wondering do japanese macs speak japanese? if so why can’t mine?)
edit: no, macs don’t speak japanese. what a shame! seems like a real oversight on the part of apple.
I was rooting around looking for language learning materials in the English speaking market, knowing that this area is far more developed in terms of products available. In doing so, I came across probably the worst advice I’ve ever heard for learning anything:
Step 3: No mistakes: Avoid mistakes. Try to use correct English from the beginning. from this crazy company
That stuck in my mind recently as I dealt with a crisis in my growing fear of actually speaking Japanese; my fear of making mistakes.
In contrast, I got some of the best advice I’ve ever heard from Raize on kenkyuukai: (at the bottom of this page)
1) It’s not English, you don’t know it, so enjoy the discovery
2) Screw up and have fun doing so!
3) When in doubt, see 1 and 2
I’d love to try an exchange with a native language speaker, but in the past face-to-face I’ve ended up speaking moostly english, and not really know what to do.
Over on 43things, I saw someone write about the problem, and was curious to ask more about it:
http://www.43things.com/comments/thread/128292
The writer, Joaquim, mentions two possible places to meet Japanese people for language exchange: jyve.com and mixi.jp. I’ll put that on my list of things to do.
Since I’m a point-blank beginner, i really can’t engage in free flowing conversation with a native speaker. i was starting to think of maybe worksheets that we could use in a language exchange. david sent me some pages with vocab, and some cute illustrations, etc. So, I’m getting excited… david and i are going to try out a language exchange via skype.
I was thinking it would be cool to make sheets expressedly for the purpose of language exchange. you could actually make up little activities or guessing games to prompt yourself into producing speech.
So you could have a two part exchange that could even work with two beginners exchanging together.
1. Preparation: models of grammatical structure
2. Reference: vocabulary list
3. Q+A or simple conversation to read
4. Some kind of activity… where you are both looking at sheets, talking to each other and maybe having some kind of guessing game… something where you have to think. Maybe a guessing game.
5. Prompts for free talk: talking about your own personal situation.
Anyway, just throwing that out there. We’ll see how the exchange goes, and I might know better then how to maake useful materials for it.
so, there’s no learning japanese podcast? wah wah wah. whine all i want, i still won’t be able to find one! i tried recording one myself and a friend laughed at me! but i’ve found another way that you can easily make podcasts from web pages.
i have found some free audio out there. check out some audio done by marsian as part of the Japanese Wikibook: … yeah, i can download it, file by file… but wouldn’t it be much nicer if there was an RSS feed i could just subscribe to, and it would notify me if there were updates? so it’s DIY time!
mfeeds scrapes pages with links to media files. “This lets you receive a podcast from any page that has [media files] on it”, oo goodie. And it generates a handy URL which you can paste into your podcast reader (software you can use to manage subscriptions to podcasts). See handy URL:
http://mfeeds.com/generate/scrape.cgi?url=http://ww6.tiki.ne.jp/~marsian/sound.htm
(these happen to be OGG files, so won’t play on b*tchy iPod or iTunes. but as I understand, OGG is a standard audio format used by WikiPedia and others who work on open standards).
but you can do this on any page with MP3 files too. the audio from japanese lessons on the MIT open course-ware site (though i don’t think you’ll see updates it still might be handy to ’scrape’ it all than download singly).
http://mfeeds.com/generate/scrape.cgi?url=http://web.mit.edu/21f.501/www/audio/Lesson3/
[edit]
also converted MP3 from NHK:
http://www.hickorytech.net/~nic111/
and a link to the feed
http://mfeeds.com/generate/scrape.cgi?url=http://www.hickorytech.net/~nic111/
むかしむかし、mukashi, mukashi (long long ago)… i began my never-ending quest for free audio resources to learn japanese…
thanks to toothinglummox (from the japanese wikibook) who gave me some titles of japanese folktales: Momo taro, Urashima taro, Kintaro and The Moon Princess.
this lead me to find:
they are written in kanji, no translation. and the speed is fast. if you’re creative you can slow down the speed (and keep the same pitch) using audacity or other audio editing tool. i think i’ll do this for my own use. (i wish the audio was public domain, then i could share).
Listen and read in Japanese:
i’m *hoping* to find public domain versions of japanese folktales written down, then get my lovely tutor to record them for me. also get the kana written out, then i can share them. got any links?
(thanks to sushi-king for links to english translation)
Oh this is very funny. Better than a translation tool.
Create a simple sentence in Japanese! You select from a variety of options to make simple sentences.
Lookie at my new sentence: 面白いと思います！(supposed to mean: I think it’s interesting)
Thanks to Karol for the link.
*phew* i have a LONG way to go to understanding japanese. fugeddaboudit. this is mildly demoralizing.
i was taking a break, looking at some lovely photologs from japan. here: 6strings and bitter girls
thought i might make use of the handy-dandy online translation tool at Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Server…
it does faithfully translate each word, sentence by sentence. this saves loads of time in looking up in the dictionary (not that i could because i don’t know how to pronounce the kanji to look up the japanese word via hiragana in the first place)…
but it makes no sense whatsoever. of course what can one expect from word by word translation? the translation results are all just a baffling list of words tumbling down the page.
i can’t wait till they invent little ear-bud automagic audio translation devices, which convert foreign language to your native language… the babelfish!
There’s loads and loads more Japanese language podcasts since I first looked for some in June. I tried listening to the myriad gaijin “whoah look at how wacky Japan is” stuff, but they’re in English anyway.
I do listen to the Nippon voice blog, but mostly it’s over my head. I am starting to pick up words here and there, which is satisfying.
If I was more advanced I might be able to find this podcast useful: tiny bite-sized peices of audio at: Kanda Japanese Podcast
Kanda Podsayings is series of very short 30-second daily podcasts in Japanese about business tips and strategies. Each episode will be delivered with a transcript which can be read on either a PC or MP3 player. This means that these podcasts/transcript can also be used as material for Japanese language learners.
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