Well it’s too bad that Mines no longer has Japanese classes anymore… But, all hope is not lost! I’m going to talk about some helpful tools if you are interested in learning on your own:
First, I have the first and second semester Japanese books (two for each semester) from when they used to have classes at Mines, so if you’re interested in that, you can mention it to me and I’ll let you borrow them. We started out learning the polite form, so the first book only talks about the polite form. Also, the first book has a set of vocabulary on almost purely alcohol related stuff, so if you’re interested in plum wine or sake or highball, etc, you might want to check it out. 😉 I have some programs too that I used for learning vocabulary and basic sentence structure (and even kanji). They weren’t made with the intent of being used by others, but still, they helped me get some decent grades (…108%+).
For online resources, I’d recommend this guide. I’m not sure how easy it is to learn from it with no background knowledge of Japanese, but it’s helped me quite a bit.
Jim Breen’s wwwjdic is also very helpful. I really only use the kanji lookup for it, although I’m sure there’s other nice stuff too. With the kanji lookup, you can also find pronunciation, words using the kanji, stroke diagrams, meaning…
Then there’s the rikaichan add-on for firefox, which uses the wwwjdic. All you do is mouse over a word in Japanese and rikaichan brings up pronunciation and definitions. It also knows certain phrases, has name dictionaries, and can bring up kanji information. It’s the reason why I installed firefox. 😉
If you know some Japanese and want to practice, Lang-8 is a site for typing diary entries in Japanese (or any language you are learning) and having it corrected by native speakers. You can make friends with other people on the site and correct diaries written by people learning English too.
Finally, I think Mines has a sister school in Japan, so if you’re interested studying abroad, you should ask the Office of International Programs about it.
If anyone has some other advice about learning Japanese, feel free to post it in the comments. 頑張れ！
(PS: Is it a problem that we’re using like 89% of our free space on this blog?)
Gene · March 28, 2011 at 8:45 am
>Is it a problem that we’re using like 89% of our free space on this blog?
Probably, but I think it just shoves old stuff out if it gets full. The old pictures, anyway. If it doesn’t do it automatically, I’ll probably do it myself.
Awesome links Daniel, this is a really helpful blog post! 🙂