holiday time is fun time!
Home for the holidays. :) As I'd hoped, I've gotten some extra time to do studying and find some Japanese resources.
JapanesePod101.com. I found this website through a discussion on the RTK Forum. One of the criticisms of the Heisig method is that it doesn't help much in the listening and speaking area, which is true. This site has literally hundreds of lessons from Beginner to Advanced and even JLPT prep courses. Each lesson has a lesson mp3, short dialog, transcription, and PDFs with explanations.
What's better is that you can sign up for a 7-day free trial and download all the mp3 dialogs. You can't get more than 10 PDFs, but you can copy and paste the transcriptions, which have Romanji, kanji, and kana, along w/ English tranlations. The audio lesson is somewhat entertaining and really well put-together.
Since I have a lot of free time at home I'm planning on using the Firefox extension DownThemAll to quickly d/l all the mp3s and copy and paste the text transcriptions. It's gone pretty fast so far and I shouldn't have too much trouble getting it all within 7 days.
I'm planning on listening to a couple lessons a week on my iPod. What I like is that I learn a bit of grammar, phrases, and culture. And my hiragana reading is good enough to be able to make out the words on the text. (draggingly slow, but still!)
I'm up to 227 on RTKana. Plan to finish by tomorrow, and then start on RTKanji!
JapanesePod101.com. I found this website through a discussion on the RTK Forum. One of the criticisms of the Heisig method is that it doesn't help much in the listening and speaking area, which is true. This site has literally hundreds of lessons from Beginner to Advanced and even JLPT prep courses. Each lesson has a lesson mp3, short dialog, transcription, and PDFs with explanations.
What's better is that you can sign up for a 7-day free trial and download all the mp3 dialogs. You can't get more than 10 PDFs, but you can copy and paste the transcriptions, which have Romanji, kanji, and kana, along w/ English tranlations. The audio lesson is somewhat entertaining and really well put-together.
Since I have a lot of free time at home I'm planning on using the Firefox extension DownThemAll to quickly d/l all the mp3s and copy and paste the text transcriptions. It's gone pretty fast so far and I shouldn't have too much trouble getting it all within 7 days.
I'm planning on listening to a couple lessons a week on my iPod. What I like is that I learn a bit of grammar, phrases, and culture. And my hiragana reading is good enough to be able to make out the words on the text. (draggingly slow, but still!)
I'm up to 227 on RTKana. Plan to finish by tomorrow, and then start on RTKanji!
