I’m back again with another YouTube video, this time about one of my favorite subjects, learning Japanese. This time, I discuss the Japanese language requirements for CIRs and how I went about learning this language.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxkw_ZW2S4

I’ve mentioned before briefly of my current Japanese study method, sentence mining, which I first learned about from AllJapaneseAllTheTime. So far it has been working out really well, my reading comprehension in particular has skyrocketed since beginning the method. However, when starting out, I had to more or less figure out on my own how to go about using this method. At AJATT, Khatz explains it in the following steps (I’m paraphrasing):

1. Find a sentence with a word(s) that you don’t understand.
2. Put that sentence into an SRS flashcard program.
3. Find a dictionary definition for what you don’t know and put it in the flashcard.
4. Don’t translate, simply try to understand.

This certainly works as a starting point, but it took me a good couple hundred cards before I started hitting my stride as far as sentence mining goes. Now that I’m approaching 1000 sentences mined, I thought I’d take a moment and write down step-by-step what I’ve found works for me when it comes to using this great language study method.

Firstly, this basis of this method is the SRS, or Spaced Repetition System. It is a kind of software that allows you to create flashcards, but it goes way beyond that. By gauging how easily you remember an item, the software employs an algorithm to “space” the next “repetition” of the flashcard. By focusing more time on what you find difficult versus what you find easy, this software simultaneously stimulates long-term memory and makes efficient use of your time.

There are many kinds of SRS software out there, but if you are studying Japanese there is only one choice as far as I’m concerned: Anki. Developed by an Aussie student of Japanese who also knows a bit of code, Anki has become a large open-source project, with many plugins and stat-tracking abilities that make keeping track of your progress a snap. But most important is the Japanese plugin, which makes Anki the best program with which to sentence mine in Japanese. Once downloaded and changing the input method to “Japanese,” the program gives you three input fields: “Expression,” “Meaning,” and “Reading.” Only Expression and Meaning have to be filled in, since Anki automatically generates the reading of your sentence with hiragana. This is a huge time saver that makes using any other SRS pale in comparison.

So now for the step-by-step instructions. First you need to get Anki installed and set up. I’m using Mac OS X, but the directions shouldn’t be much different for Windows. Go to the Anki website and download the version of Anki for your operating system. Get it installed and then launch it, where you should see a window along these lines:

Now you need to get the Japanese plugin installed. Go to File -> Download -> Shared Plugin:

You should now see the following window:Would you look at that? The Japanese plugin is number one on the list. If you don’t see it, do a search for “Japanese Support” in the search box the top. Once you have “Japanese Support” selected, click “OK” and start the download. When it finishes, restart Anki. Now it’s time to create your deck. When Anki launches again, click “Add Material.” You should now see a window like this:Currently, the “Basic” model is selected, but we need it to be Japanese. Click on the little wrench icon in the upper-right:

We only have “Basic” available as a model right now, but we can change that by clicking on “Add” and then on “Add:Japanese”:

Hit “OK,” make sure “Japanese” is selected as your model, and then hit “Close.” Now your “Add Items” window should look like this:You are now ready to start inputting your Japanese sentences! Notice in the upper-right there is a button that says “Recognition.” This is important because you will only be going from the sentence to the definition, never the other way around.

But we need some sentences, don’t we? This part is completely up to you. Whether you want to find sentences from manga, games, books, movies, lyrics, etc., it’s all good. I will say one thing that will make things easier in the beginning: try to mine sentences from websites. The primary reason for this is that it is much faster to copy-paste text from a Japanese website into Anki than it is to, say, find a sentence in a book and then have to look up all the kanji readings so you can type it in. A great tool to this end is the Rikai-chan plugin for Firefox, a clever little Japanese dictionary that looks up definitions based on the text that you are currently mousing over (Pro Tip: use the shift key while mousing over to cycle between the “word,” “kanji,” and “names” dictionaries). With it you can quickly look up readings and definitions while you are browsing Japanese websites and are still getting used to the language.

One thing I love to read online in Japanese is the news. FNN News and TBS News are great, because in addition to the articles there is usually a video with a newscaster reading the text of the article verbatim. You get reading and listening practice, 一石二鳥 (if you can’t read this, why don’t you try out your newly-downloaded Rikai-chan?). Let’s find a nice, juicy article to get some sentences from. Hmm, this looks good:

It’s about an apparent terrorist attack in Indonesia, but there is a word I don’t understand in the title, so it’s a good starting point. First things first, lets copy-paste that title into Anki:

Be sure to paste your sentence into the “Expression” field. After you tab down to the “Meaning” field, Anki automatically generates the readings for the sentence in the “Reading” field. I find that Anki’s readings are right about 80-90% of the time, so if you are just starting out, make sure you cross-check each kanji’s reading just to be safe.

Now lets look up that word I didn’t know, 地元. In the beginning, you will be best served by using a Japanese-English dictionary. But after you’ve been studying for a while, you will want to switch over to a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. There are subtleties in certain words that just aren’t done justice by a simple translation. I like to use the Yahoo! Japanese dictionary. Let’s go there now and find out what 地元 means:

According to definition one, it is the location that has a direct relation to something. In the second definition, it is the location where a person lives, or the location which falls under one’s influence. Coupled with 警察, which means police, I would take 地元警察 to mean the local cops. Let’s grab both definitions and slap them into the “Meaning” section of our new flashcard:

As you can see, I write my definitions by first writing the unknown word, then an equals sign, then the pasted definition. If I have a sentence with multiple unknown words, I break up the definitions with a semi-colon. Once the card is all set, click the “Add” button.

So how do you study these things? Once you are ready to start, click the “Close” button in the “Add Items” window and then begin your review by clicking on “Start Reviewing.” You will be presented with your first flashcard. What I do is to try and read the sentence aloud as best I can and then click on “Show Answer” (or press the spacebar). Then I check and see if what I said matches up with the reading, in addition to how well I understood the contents of the sentence. You have four options based on how well you remember – Again, Hard, Good, Easy. If I made a mistake saying or understanding any part of the sentence, I click Again. If I struggled but got it right, I click Hard. If I went through the sentence without trouble, Good. If I fly through the sentence, speaking and understanding nigh-fluently, I click Easy. I will usually try and study my deck twice a day in order to better take advantage of the nature of the spacing of the flashcards.

One last thing as far as Anki itself goes, which is synchronization. Anki has a fully-functioning online version that allows you to study in a web browser by creating an account and syncing the deck on  your computer to the Anki server. There are also some other interesting applications of this feature. Let’s get that set up now. First, go to Settings -> Preferences:

A window will pop up, under which you should see a tab called “Network.” Select it.

Click on “Create a free account” to be taken to the Anki website where you can set up your new Anki account. Once you have it created, type your user name and password into their respective fields in this window and make sure “Sync on open” and “Sync on close” are selected. This makes sure that you always have the latest, most up-to-date set of flashcards in your deck and on the server. After you do all this, click “Close” and your deck will now be able to sync! In the event of catastrophic computer failure, you can also sync with the Anki server to recover your deck, which will save you a lot of heartache in the long run.

Now for a few tips on sentence mining. The most important thing to make these flashcards enjoyable to read it to keep it short. Japanese sentences have the tendency to be many lines long, and if there is multiple new words in it, then you will almost certainly get frustrated remembering everything. I try to keep it to no more than two, maybe three unknown words in a sentence, or two lines long in the “Expression” field, which ever comes first. In this way, I’m able to quickly read the sentences in my flashcard deck and make more efficient use of my time. Of course, you may have a sentence that you want to mine that is really long, such as in a news article. At this point, it gets a bit more fuzzy and requires you to have a bit of a handle on Japanese, but the best thing I find it to cut up a sentence at “、” symbols, which are Japanese commas. If the sentence contains none of these, stopping at certain particles (は、が、に、etc.) allows you to break up a sentence while keeping it intelligible.

I know that I mentioned that you should stick to copy-pastable items, but if you have a manga or movie that you are dying to watch/read, then by all means go ahead. You may still find the internet to be of use to you. Once you come across an unknown sentence, Google it. More often than not, somebody out there has transcribed the book/movie in question. Simply copy-paste your sentences from there instead of manually typing them in. The most important thing is to not get bogged down, which you are like to do if you are just starting out. Keep it simple, short, fast, copy-pastable.

Finally, if you have a iPhone/iPod touch and are willing to jailbreak, check out AnkiMini. It’s a mobile version of Anki that let’s you study your deck on the go by syncing up with your account on the Anki server (aren’t you glad you set up an Anki account?). This is currently the best solution on the iPhone/iPod touch until the developers create a proper App Store app.

Well, that’s that. I hope that this guide will give you head start on sentence mining. If you have any further questions, comments, etc., please don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Hello all! It’s been a while since I’ve written a post here. I’ve been busy moving back home and reacclimating to the life I left here when I went to Japan. But now I’m settled back in, found myself some work before I go back to school and have gotten the Japanese study ball rolling again. I figured since this blog is a Japan-focused one, I’d reflect on a year of studying Japanese more or less full time and what’s worked and what hasn’t. Hit the jump below to read on.

I’ve been studying Japanese hardcore for about one year now, and softcore for another year before that. For all that effort, I’ve now received my JLPT 3 certificate (which I passed easily), can quite comfortably converse with friends, and am beginning to be able to read manga and some novels without much dictionary assistance. I’d say I’m solidly at an intermediate level, but I still have a long ways to go before I can proclaim myself fluent. Movies and TV, for example, are tough and I can only usually get a gist of what’s going on in the plot. However, during this time, I’ve found some things that have worked well for me in terms of studying Japanese and I thought I’d share those now.

First, I’ll start at the beginning. Having a knowledge of a language’s writing system is usually the starting point, and to that end I found that James Heisig’s books, Remembering The Kanji and Remembering the Kana, have worked wonderfully for me. I can’t even imagine tackling kana or kanji using any other method. The methods prescribed in these books work so effectively one could presumably be up and running with a full (albeit basic) knowledge of the Japanese writing system in half a year or less. I’ve encountered some criticism from friends about Heisig’s methods, especially for kanji. They wondered how you were supposed to learn the readings for the kanij, since Heisig focuses entirely on meaning and writing. What good is meaning and writing if you can’t read the characters? A whole lot, if you ask me. For one, whenever I encounter new words when reading, I can usually deduce a simple meaning based on the meanings given by Heisig, and since I already know how to write, I can focus on the reading. Plus, you have to understand, you are just starting out on the journey the Japanese literacy. You have to learn how to write and understand the underlying meaning of the kanji at some point. Why not do this part separately? I can safely say that I would have given up on reading Japanese a long time about without Remembering the Kanji, which I was seriously ready to do until I found this series of books. Do Heisig’s method, take the couple months, believe me, in the end it’ll be worth it.

Okay, now you know how to read and write at a basic level, now what? Well, it was at this point that I’ve found a few things that have worked for me in terms of building vocabulary and comprehension. Since I was an exchange student, the daily interactions I had with friends was invaluable for speaking and listening practice. However, you may not be in such an easy position to get out and interact with Japanese people. Thankfully, if you are reading this, you have all the tools you need. There are a number of great websites out there that promote language exchange. The most interesting one I’ve found is Lang-8, where users post blogs in the language they are trying to learn and native speakers can offer corrections. There are also websites out there where people can connect to speak, such as at xLingo. I think that constant interaction with natives of the language is incredibly important, not just for the obvious benefits to your language skills. It is also your number one motivator to continue to learn. You can only sit in your room by yourself studying so long without wondering if it’s all worth it. If you can make even one friend who speaks the language you want to learn, I guarantee you will work that much harder to speak with them than if you didn’t have such a friend.

So Joe, then, you may ask, how about some concrete techniques and tools to use when studying? Well, I am personally a major fan of the method prescribed at AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com, with a few caveats. The basis of the AJATT method is “sentence mining,” wherein you scour native texts (in the form of movies, video games, comics, and the like) and enter full sentences containing words or grammar that you do not understand into an SRS, or Spaced Repetition System, which is basically a fancy flashcard program. By doing so, you simultaneously immerse yourself in the language you are studying, learning in a way not unlike a child would their first language, and actively study unknown material. The SRS is great because unlike regular flashcards, an SRS will gauge your performance over time and display cards for you exactly at the moment you would have forgotten, so that you get to the point where you have whole years before seeing the same card again. It is at this point that the words/grammar in question are invariably burned into your memory for all eternity. Using sentence mining, I have drastically increased my reading and comprehension to the point where I can more or less breeze through manga and read a short news article in 10 minutes or so. My favorite SRS is Anki, particularly for its Japanese-specific functionality. Whenever you put in a sentence, like one full of kanji, the program automatically generates the readings and puts it on the “answer” side of the card.

Another major tenant of ATATT is 24/7 immersion in audio, hence “All Japanese All The Time.” At first I was skeptical of whether I could do such a thing, especially if I wouldn’t be able to understand the majority of what I heard. But now that I’ve been listening to more Japanese than English on a daily basis, I can say that immersing yourself in audio does wonders for just about every aspect of language learning. Being able to follow the ebb and flow of conversion, the vocal tics, pauses and intonations is essential for fluency. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve even asked at work if I can run a small stereo in the back while I do my job, so that I am now listening to Japanese for 12+ hours a day.

However, I haven’t been using the AJATT the whole time I’ve learned Japanese and the fact that AJATT forbids studying grammar by itself bugs me. It would be so slow and painful to read anything without at least a little bit of grammar under your belt. Most of the grammar study I’ve done has been through the Minna No Nihongo textbook series while I was studying in Japan. Of course, buying a book to study grammar on your own is a bit pointless when you have the internet. Just do a search, I’m sure you will come up with some great resources to use. I’ve heard great things about this site in particular.

I’ll wrap up with a rough schedule of my daily life recently, to give you an idea of my study habits:

• 11:00am – Wake up, put on headphones running a Japanese podcast and go downstairs.
• 11:15am – Eat breakfast while continuing to listen.
• 11:45am – Go upstairs again, grab my iPod stereo.
• 12:00pm – Shower while my stereo blasts some J-Rock or some more podcasts.
• 12:30pm – Settle in front of the computer to get down to some concentrated study. Turn on KeyHoleTV to watch Japanese TV while I work.
• 12:45pm – Hit up Reviewing the Kanji, do any kanji reviews I need to do.
• 1:15~1:30pm – Fire up Anki and review expired cards.
• 2:30pm – After finished my Anki reviews, I just do whatever catches my fancy to harvest new sentences from. This could be a manga, movie, video game, website, anything. Often I’ll switch between multiple things to keep it fresh and fun.
• 5:00pm – Input the last sentences into Anki, do the final reviews.
• 6:00pm – Go to work while playing more Japanese stuff on my car stereo.
• 6:30pm – Get started at work, fire up the iPod stereo and listen listen listen.
• 1:30am~3:00am – Finish at work, go home playing Japanese on my car stereo again.
• 3:30am – Sleep while running KeyHoleTV quietly in the background.

Obviously, this might be excessive for some. But I have every intention of becoming fluent in Japanese before I graduate next year and go back to Japan to work, probably as an English teacher at first. If you have any questions or criticisms about my study techniques, please leave a comment. If you have some super-awesome study technique I’ve yet to read about, definitely leave a comment! Until next time! 頑張ろう！

I thought I would take some time out and write a bit about how my Japanese has come and where I hope it will go. I thought I’d also talk about what I’ve found that works when it comes to studying Japanese and what hasn’t. Well, without further ado, let’s go!

Before I came to Japan, I had taken three semesters of Japanese class at my school back in the States. They wern’t exactly regular classes you’d take at a college: they were small and had to be privately arraigned through the languages department. We’d have a Japanese exchange student teach us in a group setting twice a week for 50 minutes. You’d think that the small classes would be helpful, but looking back now they really wern’t. The biggest issue was the class was taught primarily in English. All of the Japanese exchange students, almost without exception it seems, were fluent in English and seemed perfectly happy to chat it up with us in class (I’ve heard from students here at Hirosaki that UMaine has some of the toughest TOEFL requirments of any of the schools that Hirosaki exchanges students with). The most meaningful experience I had with Japanese while at UMaine was meeting once a week with a graduate student to do one-on-one conversation practice. At first, I couldn’t even understand the simplest of questions from her, since the only real experience I’d had with Japanese up to that point was through textbooks. But over the course of a couple months I started to get at least a little confortable talking in simple Japanese.

Overall, my time learning Japanese at UMaine was of very little use to me here. Honestly, when I first came here, I could barely speak a word. The extent of my Japanese ability was “where is. . . “, or “is this. . .?”, and the like. Because of this, I was put into the lowest level Japanese class here, Elementary Japanese. However, this was far from a bad thing after just a couple weeks in the class. I was really learning in this setting! Not just because of the fact that I was in Japan, but because of the fact that the classes were taught entirely in Japanese. I began learning rapidly at this point and after a couple of months, I found that I could engage in intelliglble (albeit still simple) conversation.

It was then that I realized the most important thing in language learning – the language! I think a lot of language learners, looking back, miss the point. They are taking classes more to learn about the language, rather than actually use it. By immersing yourself from day one in a language, like I was able to here for the first few weeks of my Elementary Japanese class, you quickly learn more than you would in a semester-long class in a month.

So that was what I found out in the first semester. Now the second semester is here and I’m at the halfway point of my stay here in Japan. How much Japanese do I know now? I can easily hold a conversation in Japanese with my friends for several hours now. I actually feel that my strongest suit is my speaking and listening ability, moreso than my reading and especially writing. But I’m far from satisfied with myself. I feel like I’m only just past crawling and beginning to walk, and I think soon I could begin to run. I often feel like I’m on the edge, the cusp of fully understanding sun up to sun down everything I see and hear. Because of that, I’m studying as much as I ever have. I’m glad that I extended my stay here so that I could continue to fully devote myself to language learning. If you are going to come to Japan for a foreign exchange, definitely stay here for two semesters at least! Not just because being in a foreign country is a great time, but because you will only just beginning to find your stride after a semester. I feel now that I can continue to study and learn Japanese almost exclusively for the next several months, without burnout and with a steady increase in ability.

I guess that wraps it up – I just wanted to layout some of the things I’ve been thinking about myself and Japanese. Hope everyone had a great Halloween, I know I did! Check my Twitpic for some of the pictures.

I promised a few posts back that I would give everyone a little bit of a review of the book “Remembering the Kanji” by James Heisig. The method for studying the kanji outlined in this book is quite unlike any other that you will probably run across. The core of the method relies on imaginative memory, which I will expand on in a bit. The reason I came to try this method of kanji study over others is because of my great luck with Heisig’s other Japanese writing study book, “Remembering the Kana.” With that book, I was able to achieve fast proficiency in both the writing and reading of the characters that comprise the kana. It uses a method similar to the one in “Remembering the Kani,” although it is not 100% the same. I can say up front that I am having an equally good experience with Heisig’s kanji book as I did with his kana book.

First things first, though: this book is not designed to help you “read” the kanji. Unlike “Remembering the Kana,” you will not find the slightest reference to the way the characters are verbalized or read in Japanese. Instead, this book serves to familiarize the reader with the 1850 base kanji required by the Japanese government that all high school students must know upon graduation. By familiarize, I mean you will be able to write the kanji with perfect stroke order and be able to recall their meaning. All of the meanings given in this book are in English, so it won’t help you expand your Japanese vocabulary either. But the ability to write and comprehend meaning in any language is half the battle, especially with a writing system as verbose as Japanese has. So now you know what you are getting into. Clearly, if you wish to use this method, it must be complemented in some what that you can come to learn the readings. For me, I have found that I already know many of the kanji’s readings (or at least one) and by using this method I have been able to proverbally “put a face to a name.”

So how does Heisig’s method work? Like I mentioned before, this method relies on what Heisig refers to as imaginative memory. For each kanji he presents in the book, a story with a strong associated mental image is given. The idea is to see the image in your mind’s eye when looking at the kanji. In this way, you can remember a kanji by drumming up a scene in your head instead of relying on rote memorization.

Heisig creates this images through what he calls primatives. Throughout the course of the book, especially in the early lessons (which is where I am), he takes the simple, basic kanji consisting of few strokes and correlates them to an object, which usually has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the character by itself. These include shellfish, fire, tools, nails, drops (of anything), St. Bernard dogs, etc. The use of imaginative memory by the reader is important at these points, so that future kanji can be more easily broken down into parts.  The kanji in RtK are delivered in such a way that the primatives you just learned are combined together to create new kanji and sometimes even new primatives.

For example, 目 (eye) is learned early on. This one is pretty easy because you can sort of imagine if the kanji was rounded you would see an eye, albeit sans iris. Later, you come to learn 貝 (shellfish). How do you remember that this character means shellfish? Heisig has you imagine a shellfish with one giant eyeball on two little legs, skittering around a beach. This character is also given the primative meaning of shellfish, and goes on to appear in many, many more kanji, in which the stories involve shellfish in various situations.

I have so far made it through 130 kanji. If I was to see these kanji on a sign, I would have some idea of their meaning, and if asked to write them, I could reproduce them. But like I said, this book cannot stand on its own. You will need to learn the readings to complement the writings and meanings that you learn in this book. I would say that this book is a great method  to use for beginning students of kanji (which I am one myself). The writings and meanings of the kanji I have so far learned have stuck better with me than any other method I have tried. Ultimately, I recommend giving “Remembering the Kanji” a shot.

If you do decide to pick up the book, I highly recommend that you check out the website Reviewing the Kanji, a community-driven site that includes tools to create and organize flashcards and study the kanji after completing a lesson in Heisig’s book. It even has a section for people to submit their own stories for the kanji, many of which I have found to produce even more powerful images than the original prescribed by Heisig.

I hope that this was helpful to all you kanji learners out there! With any luck, I’ll be able to get few a couple hundred before I go to Japan. Then, the real learning begins!

I have extolled the virtues of James Heisig’s method for learning the kana in my earlier posts. His book, Remembering the Kana, had me competent with the Japanese syllabaries in the three hours they advertised. Coupled with practice, I can read the kana fairly well. However, kana is just a piece of the puzzle. I still have to come to grips with the kanji, so I decided to order Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji from Amazon.com. It uses the same method as with the kana book: associate each character with an image and story so that you can remember both the writing and the meaning. I’ll post my impressions of the book here once I get it in the mail.

The above image is from Andy – アンドレア on Flickr, who used the book to learn those above kanji. If I can have even that many kanji under my belt before I leave, I’ll be happy!

I have been a student of Japanese for a nearly two years now, and I felt that today I would share the various websites, podcasts, programs and books I have found useful in the learning process. To be sure, there is an abundance of material out there, for free, that can be used to learn Japanese (or any other language for that matter) online. I’ll start with those.

• JapanesePod101.com - The most complete site on the net to learn Japanese with. Its foundations are the podcasts that Peter Galante and crew produce every weekday. You get great audio lessons with native Japanese speakers, and a helpful community through blog comments and the forums. For a little extra money, you can get access to the “Premium Learning Center,” which includes additional study materials like lesson notes and flashcards.

• Yamasa Online Kanji Dictionary – I really like this dictionary for one reason alone: every kanji has an animation of the stroke order. It makes learning to write the kanji a breeze.

• Remember the Kana by James Heisig – Ok, now for the stuff you have to pay for. This book is well worth it. Instead of relying on rote memorization to learn the hiragana and katakana, Heisig associates each character with an image relating to its sound. For example, you remember け (ke) by seeing the image of a CApe and dagger.

• Visual Language Learning Cards – Once you get the kana down, you are going to want to consolidate what you have learned. These are good, sturdy portable flashcards that include both a hiragana and katakana set.

• Yookso! by Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku – This is the textbook that we are using in my Japanese class. I wouldn’t recommend it by itself, but it is good in a classroom setting. This is a good resource for learning grammar as well.

• Rosetta Stone – This set of computer software is a bit pricey, but it’s a very different way to learn from the other tools I have shown so far. At no point do you do any translating or hear any English. It is immediate immersion. You learn vocabulary entirely by listening to a native speaker, and then try to match what they said from a selection of four photographs. I can testify to it working very well, but it does require a more time if you are not fast on picking up on the sounds.

A few more hints and tips: Learn the kana right away. It is important to not rely on the crutch of “romaji” (Japanse written with roman letters) when studying. You will need to learn the kana anyway if you want to attain any degree of literacy in Japanese. If you can manage it, take a class on Japanese, preferably through a local college. Being able to interact with other people and speak to them conversationally does a great deal to help you retain what you learn. It is also the most fun way to learn if you have a good instructor. Also, listen to as much Japanese as you can. Get your hands on Japanese music, watch anime with subtitles, do what ever you can to hear it everyday. By doing so you learn the natural patterns in the language and this helps you to speak more fluenly and increases your comprension.

Finally, if you have a Mac, I would recommend you download Provoc and Genius. These are two wonderful pieces of software. Provoc is a neat way to create vocabulary lists and study them in any variety of user-defined ways. Genius is primarily concerned with memorization of vocabulary and works by using a special algorithm that adapts to what you know and what you don’t.

Well, I think that will do it. Hopefully for all the new students of Japanese out there, you will have found this to be helpful.