Learn to speak and write Japanese fluently

Today I completed lesson #20 from the beginner series. My flash cards now have 84 entries that I can use for drilling (especially for learning kana; I definitely need the practice!). There are a total of 156 beginner lessons available on this podcast as of today… so I still have some catching up to do. Also, I find that it really helps to listen to a lesson every day. Skipping days makes it that much harder to pick up where I left off!

This is a great resource—I’ve started listening to their daily podcasts for beginners, which is a good review for my rusty Japanese basics. Highly recommended.

I got a demo version of the Rosetta Stone software (Japanese) and I’ve found it to be quite well thought out. It allows you to learn and practice reading, writing, and speaking (it will record you and display a spectral plot of your utterance, which you can visually compare to a native speaker’s utterance; this is really helpful since when you’re new to a language, you may not be able to distinguish audibly how you’re deviating from the correct pronunciation). Learning is fairly painless and driven by pictures, leveraging the human visual association strengths. I’m now tempted to go ahead and buy the full Year 1 and Year 2 packages (the sampler just has ~10 lessons in it).