Useful Japanese Resources

Would you like to learn Japanese?

This page will be a page for a bunch of useful resources for Japanese learners, from learning Japanese to meeting Japanese people and practicing. If you have anything you could add here, please let me know. :)

Grammar
Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese
This site has many things on it, but it's best known for it's Grammar explanations.

Vocabulary
Live Mocha  
Flash Cards

Listening, Practicing&Meeting Japanese people
Lang-8
Interpals
The Mixxer
The Mixxer is probably the best place I've been to to meet Japanese people and practice. If you have skype, it's probably better. Within two days I had probably 30 friend requests!!

Dictionary
Jisho

Reading&Writing
Hiragana/Katakana Flashcards
Rikai-chan
Kanji Land!

A little bit of Everything
Erin's Challenge! I can speak Japanese   
Renshuu

Test your Japanese
Japanese Test


Studying a new language, especially on your own, can be one of the toughest things you can do.

Other ways you can study are, see if there's any classes or tutors in your area(if you can afford it.) Buy textbooks. On eBay, I found little $2 kanji guides that they use in elementary school. They're cute :)

There are some books and textbooks that I would recommend.

Living Language Japanese is a great book. It has culture notes, vocabulary, grammar, writing, and scenarios. Everything is written in romaji, though. Great for beginners and beginner-intermediates.
Genki is also a great textbooks, most often used in classrooms. They're more on the pricey side, but if you get the textbook and the workbook it's a great combination. There is Genki I for beginners and Genki II that directly follows.
Japanese for Busy People is good as well. It starts off for beginners and you can work your way up to the third volume for it. The first one comes in either romaji or kana. I would recommend getting the kana version, so you can practice your reading skills while you learn.

I would also invest in getting a physical dictionary. If you have an iPod or iPhone, Kotoba! is a very good dictionary app.
Speaking of Apps, Japanese Essentials is pretty decent, and it's free.
If you have a Nintendo DS, My Japanese Coach is also a great game for beginners.


Another option for people learning Japanese is going to Japan.
You could probably pick up some Japanese on a vacation, if that's all you really want to do/can afford to do.
Other options would be as I am doing, and going on an exchange program, either in high school or college. If you are thinking about going on an exchange program in high school, though, I would recommend you wait until either Junior or Senior year Once you are a sophmore, you are allowed to go to Japan on exchange, however... it's a very difficult thing to go to, and you need to be mature enough & ready to handle a lot on your own.

If an exchange program isn't your thing, you could go to a language school in Japan.
There's different lengths of programs - I've seen anywhere from 6 months to 2 years.
And many different schools. There's NILS, WAHAHA, MLC... you just gotta do a little bit of research.


I hope that helped some of you hopefuls wanting to learn Japanese, at least a little bit :)