Japanese Language Thread

[alekth]

That Minna no Nihongo book (or rather set) is also pretty good for self study. It comes with the main textbook (all in Japanese), English grammar book with explanations and translations matching the lessons in the textbook, and there are CDs where a native speaker reads the new words, grammar patterns, dialogue and dialogue exercises for every lesson. (There's also a kanji book and a couple of practice books). There are also videos for the dialogues, they found some foreigners for them, it's hilarious (my class has dubbed them the cyborg (American guy, behaves like one) and the Narco Baron (supposed tio be Brazillian). Luckily they don't speak on the CDs, just the videos.

@Akvod, you can give them a look to check what and how they cover (there's also part II, but that's coming next semester for me, so I haven't bought it/looked at it yet).

Of course like most textbooks it starts off with polite Japanese, we're still sticking with -masu verb form. Though our teacher said they were some of the rare textbooks that drop the "anata" for "you" as soon as they deem it reasonable that people are getting used to not always talking with pronouns.

For Flashkards, there are very good kanji flashcards (and there's a kana set too, though I don't think that is necessary) by White Rabbit Press.

Actually pretty much everything from Minna no Nihongo and the kanji flashcards for at least the first two JLPT (Level 4 and 3) are floating around on torrent sites.

I got the White Rabbit Press kanji cards, but for the new words I'm using a program called Anki (it's free, google it up). You make your own flashcards with it and then practice (it also decides on when you need to revise what). There are already a couple of decks shared for Minna no Nihongo, I'm planning on making one for my own for the vocabulary (with sound, since the ones now don't have that)... will actually do that during the weekend, but so far only for lessons 1-8 and then expand it as my course moves along.