I spent the better part of my childhood afternoons at a Japanese language class at the neighborhood Buddhist temple. Japanese School was the after school program of my generation, a place where parents sent their kids to keep them out of their hair for a couple of hours. If you learned a little bit of Japanese, well, that was just a a bonus. Even after attending classes an hour a day, five days a week for eight years, most Japanese School graduates are not fluent, but have a rudimentary knowledge of the language. Now, decades later, the use-it-or-lose it principle certainly applies. While I’m still fluent at reading and writing hiragana and katakana and recognizing a handful of common kanji, I am very hesitant to attempt to carry on a conversation in Japanese. On countless occasions, I have wished that I had continued in my studies of nihongo (the Japanese language) and lamented over my lack of conversational skills. So, when I discovered Mango Languages, it gave me a renewed interest in picking up Japanese again.
Mango Languages is a free Internet course that offers 100 lessons for various languages such as Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek. I am on lesson 4 (of 101) and have found it to be a good refresher. There are over 100 slides per lesson, but a lot of it is redundant information to help you review and check your knowledge of what you just learned. Especially helpful is the way the words are color-coded for easier translation, written in both English and Japanese hiragana. If you don’t read hiragana, hover your mouse over the characters and a pop-up box of the romanization appears. Each lessons starts with a short dialog and the slides explain the translations and grammatical elements to give you a good understanding of why the sentence is structured as it is. The dialog features native speakers, so that you can hear the proper pronunciation and practice emulating it.
Peeking ahead to the last lesson, I realized that Mango will provide a good foundation, but I’d like to continue to develop my skills beyond that level, so I started looking for more resources. In iTunes, you’ll find a ton of free podcasts you can subscribe to on virtually any topic you can imagine. In the search bar, I typed, “learn Japanese” and got a list of 46 podcasts. Surely not all of them will be gems, but keeping a keen eye on the “popularity” rating will generally give you an idea of who’s hot and who’s not. The most popular podcast listed was called JapanesePod101.com. I navigated to their website and found that it’s a company that backs the free podcast, offering free and paid subscriptions to their service. I immediately signed up for the free 7-day trial and will tour around and let you know what I find. If the resources are as comprehensive as they say, it may be worth the $8/month to subscribe. They also have a “premium” service which is $25/month. Of course, discounts are offered if you pay for the year up front, so I may opt to do that if I choose to subscribe.
Have you heard of JapanesePod101.com or tried the service? If so, tell me what you think!
If the service can keep me engaged and interested in learning Japanese, it will be a good investment indeed. Will keep you posted…