Mini language challenge of the week: Japanese
My boyfriend came up with the idea on Sunday at 5am that it would be interesting to see how much Japanese I could learn in a week! I thought it was a cool idea since I have never attempted to learn a language that uses a different alphabet. I started yesterday and I’m going to see how far I can get in a week! I may or may not make this weekly challenges a recurring thing, I’ll see how busy I get as I’ve got my intensive German course starting next week!
So far my resources are:
Live Mocha – I began the “Japanese 101″ course on Live Mocha yesterday and maid Anki cards from all of the new vocabulary.
One Minute Japanese – I am currently listening to this short series of Podcasts from Radio Lingua to learn some more basics of the language.
JapanesePod101 – I am a little bit overwhelmed by this website right now for some reason but I think it could be a great resource. I signed up yesterday and listened to the first podcast of the second season of “Newbies” (It was recommended somewhere on the site to start with this one for some reason!) I’m going to listen to the next episode soon.
I’m also going to read a lot on All Japanese All The Time and About.com‘s Japanese page.
If you guys have any other recommendations than please let me know! On Sunday I will report back here what I have learned and what I have personally found the most helpful! 
さよなら!
Well, not meaning to be self-promoting but the course on my site made by Carl seems to work pretty well: http://www.ikindalikelanguages.com/courses/JapaneseBasicsAudio/
It’s not complete but there is still some four hours of material.
Give it a try.
Thanks a lot!
(don’t worry about self-promotion, I love your site!)
Hi Jess,
Interesting challenge!
A few basic lessons with audio, using MLN of course
http://www.mylanguagenotebook.com/learn_japanese.aspx
Sorry Jim, your comment was sent to spam for some reason!
I will definitely check out Japanese on MLN!
By the way – I was writing that review post for MLN but I was having a few problems. One of them was that I couldn’t copy the link that was created when I wanted to embed the player onto my blog. I think the other problem is that the website didn’t work very well with Safari, but I think it was ok with Firefox. I will try again soon!
Hi Jess,
If you are one a Mac, you have to select the code, hold down ‘Command’ and then click C. On Windows, it is Ctrl and C.
I will look into the Safari thing.
Have a good one!
I took a few screenshots of the Safari problem and I will send them to you in a few minutes.
It was actually ctrl + c on my mac to copy! I had been trying apple(command) + c but it wasn’t working.