Quote:
Originally Posted by ktchan79
I've taken the JLPT3. Waiting for my results in February, I think I did okay on all except listening. x_o My main goal is to be fluent- that means reading, writing, listening, speaking, but others may just limit to listening/speaking or other combinations. Your choice; structure your own learning course carefully based off of that.
Okay, so there's a shitload of free resources online. I did buy a few books- the most useful of which was Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi. However, the most helpful things... were free! However, all of these resources assume you know how to read hiragana and katakana already. I suggest you memorize those before moving on to these resources.
Guidetojapanese.org by Tae Kim gives a rundown on nearly every grammar you'll encounter, including slang, teineigo, kenjouhyougen, you name it.
renshuu.org is a strictly vocab-practicing website; I used to use it a lot in the beginning. Some people also like to use Anki, but my brain tends to memorize things reasonably well if I just write them ten, twenty times and stare at the word/definition for a few minutes. Or hours.
If you're looking for a dictionary, I swear by Denshi Jisho. Searching by radicals is awesome too, if you're familiar with those. If you can't read anything, you could also use this: a kanji/kana/romaji converter.
There's a site called Kanjidamage, which my friend recommended for learning kanji. There's also readthekanji.com. I just go by the tried and true... write it a million times. Oh, here's some free fonts, if you want pretty Japanese text. |
Thanks for all the online resources. I've tried googling some sites already and came up with a lot but these sites you provided are awesome.
I'm saving up to take formal lessons but these websites are really useful. Just by reading some of the online lessons, I can already understand some of the words in the animes that I watch so I'm wanting to learn more so I can have my own interpretation of the anime and manga i watch and read.