What kind of websites and software do you like to use to study Japanese? Of course renshuu.org is very nice, but how do you feel about Smart.FM, Anki, etc.?
I have signed up for Smart.FM several times, but in the end I never actually used it.. Recently I encountered problems with a list I wanted to study. Items wouldn't load and it would just say "undefined" instead of the word I was trying to study. And I guess I prefer Renshuu because it's more reliable - you know the vocabulary is correct, and not just something some user wrote down.
The same goes for Anki, either you have to make your own deck, which takes forever, or use something a user made, but you have no idea if it's correct or not (and the JLPT decks are outdated).
I used smart.fm when it was starting out, but then they changed it all up and made it a pay service. I'd also found renshuu.org, which i thought was better overall.
I also used Anki, but for some reason renshuu.org seems better to me, especially because it can pose all kinds of different learning vectors, not just back/front of card.
There are some good self-study sites if you use Genki, but I don't think anything holds a candle to renshuu for SRS. Just a happy customer.
I had no idea Smart.fm was a pay site now... I used to use that all the time, but I stuck mostly to their "Core 2000" lists, and the Hiragana Times ones and stuff, so you could be fairly certain that they were official and correct, moreso than using user-made lists. I enjoyed having the sentences read to me by native speakers, and the site was pretty and user-friendly, so it was a good site for a beginner.
When I was even more of a beginner than my Smart.fm days, I used lrnj.com's Slime Forest program to get a handle on my kanji. It's mostly only good for teaching you an English description for each kanji (although the developer is adding other features), but the mnemonics used were very fun and useful, and it helped me become comfortable with kanji in a quick and pleasant manner. I don't have much of a use for it these days, but I doubt I would have gotten this far had that program not been there to get me over my fear of the idea of learning thousands of kanji characters.
I used Anki for maybe a week or two on a friend's recommendation. It made me think he just likes torturing himself, haha.
These days I use Renshuu pretty much exclusively.
The KanjiBox app on Facebook is also fun sometimes. It would be a lot more fun if any of my Japanese-studying Facebook buddies would man up and try to beat my scores, though.
Although I use Renshuu almost exclusively to drill, I also like using Tae Kim's grammar guide for deeper explanations of grammer points (www.guidetojapanese.org) and jisho.org to find example sentences for translation practice.
In his guide, Tae Kim recommends http://www.alc.co.jp/ to search for phrases. But if you're at the intermediate or higher levels, you may want to consider using it for translation practice. It can be a bit challenging to find your way around, imo, but there are some exercises for learning English posted that you can use to check your translation skills and vocabulary knowledge against current event articles. Here's some examples:[url=http://www.alc.co.jp/eng/hearing/hm/news/index.html] http://www.alc.co.jp/eng/hearing/hm/news/index.html[/url], [url=http://www.alc.co.jp/eng/hearing/hm/movie/index.html]http://www.alc.co.jp/eng/hearing/hm/movie/index.html[/url].
I use Jisho.org, Yahoo!辞書 and this site exclusively. Tae Kim's site really doesn't do it for me, I believe. I find a lot of the explanations a bit confusing for my learning style and the boards, like I said once before, really don't help since everyone who posts there seems to be N2 - N1 in level.
I also use Lang-8 for critiquing of my writing and to find out my weak points (which currently seems to be tenses and switching in and out of keigo and slang when not supposed to). The hardest part of this language is all the rules and exceptions, there seems to be more of it in Japanese than English (ie: から can be used either way, but ので must exclusively be used when not stating a personal opinion - augh my head). So Lang-8 kind of helps in showing my errors and correcting them by the community members.
[quote author=mikepinkerton link=topic=1041.msg6025#msg6025 date=1289758391] I used smart.fm when it was starting out, but then they changed it all up and made it a pay service. I'd also found renshuu.org, which i thought was better overall.
I also used Anki, but for some reason renshuu.org seems better to me, especially because it can pose all kinds of different learning vectors, not just back/front of card.
There are some good self-study sites if you use Genki, but I don't think anything holds a candle to renshuu for SRS. Just a happy customer.
-Mike [/quote]
Smart.FM isn't a pay site now. I use the Japanese Core 2000 daily for vocabulary studying and use the dictation test on there to test my listening and dictation skills.
Here is my Smart.FM Profile: http://smart.fm/users/CocoaSamurai
[quote author=kitamiadam link=topic=1041.msg6335#msg6335 date=1292266498] Does anyone have any facebook applications they'd recommend for study? [/quote] The only FB app that I know of that's any good for practice is the KanjiBox app - I used that for a while, but since I can't access facebook at work anymore (and that's when I do most of my studying!) I haven't used it in a long time. As for other useful stuff online, the only other thing I ever really use is Jim Breen's JDICT [url=http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C]http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C[/url] - it tends to have good definitions and is great when I don't want to get up and grab my 電子辞書 ;)
One site that hasn't been mentioned yet is Read The Kanji at http://readthekanji.com It is a paid service ($20/year), but has an a lot of stats and decks to practice with. It keeps track of all the kanji you've learned and presents it in a colorful graph. Pretty handy.
Basically how it works is it will give you a word in kanji and you have to type in the word. It's a great way to practice readings. There are also a ton of options to shut off example sentences or English meanings etc...
Actually I am learning japanese from one website which gives also information about JLPT, having JLPT lessons. You can also look for learning japanese here.
@Dabas I just checked out that site http://nihongo-e-na.com/eng/ and your right, it list just about every respectable website out there to help you learn Japanese. Thanks for the info.
Unfortunately, with no app to be able to study when I'm off line, renshuu has been beat out by Anki for flash-card style studying.
I can use Anki on my iphone and on my desktop, not having to be connected to the internet. I love the flashcards for kanji. I have a kanji practice book (if you're in Japan you can grab them at the 100 yen shop). When an English word comes up, I have to write it and say the reading. When it comes up in Japanese, I have to read it and say the English. - Not always out loud as I am usually studying at work. But it's quite helpful.
Thanks for the candid thoughts. I'd love to make an offline version in the future if I can figure out an easy way to do it; although I feel like phones are going to be more and more 'permanently connected' in the future. Anyways, thank you!
Beckyr16: If I may ask, did you pay for your Anki app? As far as I know, that's the only way to access your cards offline without syncing constantly.
マイケル: Having an offline version would be another way to monetize the site, I suspect. I personally would love to have access to it when I'm say, traveling on a plane/train without a readily available internet connection. I would rather support Renshuu than Anki, to be honest!
@kanji-kanji-kanji (Sorry I can't read them, yet!) - I did. I was using it like crazy on my computer and decided it was worth it to help the guy who's creating it keep it up. I like having it on my phone and able to use it whenever (I like to study before I fall asleep, sometimes it's the only chance I get all day). If you have any questions feel free to send them my way. I'll do my best to answer. It's kind of an expensive app, but I loved the desktop version, so I was fairly certain that I'd love this as well.
