Yomiuri Online Online Video

Find various streaming video options on this site from the Yomiuri Shimbun.

David Hallgren’s Nihongo Website

David Hallgren offers various tools for studying Japanese, including:
– Hiragana and Katakana quizes
– various Kanji quizes and exercises
– vocabulary practice drills that cover the Genki textbooks as well as the JLPT levels 3 and 4
– a grammar database (currently in nascent stages it appears)
– a forum
– a kana editor (IE only supported)

HSC Online – Japanese Course Materials

Find various audio and text files with associated exercises covering beginners’, continuers’, extension and background speakers’ courses.

電子文藝館小説

Here is a large collection of novels in electronic form.

Editor’s Note: I am not sure if these are actually complete texts or just excerpts…

York University Japanese Studies Program Materials

Access various course materials from York University’s Japanese Studies Program on this site. Materials include vocabulary lists, lesson notes and dialogues, reading materials, exercises, dictation practice sounds, and quicktime videos for the following:
– Elementary Modern Standard Japanese
– Intermediate Modern Standard Japanese
– Advanced Modern Standard Japanese
– Advanced Reading in Contemporary Japanese

Additional content includes:
– Brief History of Japan
– … [ Read more ]

Hitokuchi Douwa (ひとくち童話 )

This site offers a series of short readings. In fact, the title ひとくち can be translated as mouthful, one word or bite. Douwa is fairy tale.

Ken Ijikevich Ujie’s Reading Materials

This site, written entirely in Japanese, offers numerous pages of Japanese reading aimed at covering everyday and other topics. Others have recommend the daily life/culture reading materials (「日常生活に見る日本の文化」読み教材).

Digital E-hon Site (デジタル絵本)

This site offers lots of digitized versions of e-hon (picture books) and in multiple languages. You can see the books covered by picture or title indexes.

Editor’s Note: the standard display is an image of the page so the text can’t be highlighted (and thus is not useful for tools like rikaichan). But, if you choose the big characters (大きな字) option then the text is … [ Read more ]

MLC Meguro Language Center – Free Material

Meguro Language Center offers some examples of their original teaching materials here, mostly in Flash or PDF format. Materials are separated into flash, beginner, low-intermediate, high-intermediate, intermediate and advanced, JETRO Test, and JLPT. The JLPT materials are especially useful, containing requirments, kanji lists, vocabulary lists and grammar points covered.

Chung’s Study Method (英語は絶対、勉強するな!)

Judging from bookstore displays and train ads, Chung Changyong’s Eigo wa zettai, benkyou suru na! was very popular with the Japanese public. Chung’s book, translated from the Korean, details his language learning method, which the author of this article says can be applied to JSL learners.

Japanese as a Second Language Pleasure reading (娯楽のための読書)

A variety of recommendations (and articles) on pleasure reading for JSL students, covering the following topics:
– For Kids (& JSL Learners!)
– Fiction
– Non-fiction
– Movie & TV Reading
– Audio books
– Language Learning

Yomihoudai

1. Yomihoudai is an application to help read Japanese text.
2. Texts are culled from the Web, Sources are Acknowledged wherever possible.
3. Texts are rendered in 3 ways:
1. Hyperlinked Words: Japanese text scraped from original pages, morphanalysed and linked to Edict/Enamdict dictionaries.
2. Hardcopy: Japanese text presented as a static page, with a vocabulary at the end.
3. ChaSen … [ Read more ]

チュウ太の読解教材バンク (Reading Comprehension Teaching Materials Bank)

This site from Reading Tutor has reading material in Japanese and you can choose the difficulty level from 1 star easy to 5 stars difficult. The writing is supplemented by a dictionary of the word that you click on and the word is also added to your list at the bottom. Just check it out to get the picture.

Logos Children’s Library

Find online text and audio for various children’s stories in Japanese. Stories include:
– いっすんぼうし
– うらしまたろう
– かぐやひめ
– かさじぞう
– かちかちやま
– さるとかに
– たなばた
– つるのおんがえし
– ももたろう
– やまんばと牛方
– 舌切りすずめ

Nihongo o Manabou (にほんごをまなぼう)

Beginning dialogs done with Flash. All are related to being a student (classroom, teachers, schoolmates, etc.) While this seems simplistic, there is actually a lot of material presented and quite a bit of vocabulary. If you visit the main page, you will find that versions exist for English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Cambodian. To get those to work, use the ? marker on … [ Read more ]

ECIS Internet Broadcast (インタネート放送局)

An Internet Broadcasting Site developed by Richard Harrison in the Education Center for International Students, Nagoya University, Japan. Includes multiple lessons geared toward intermediate, advanced and superior levels.

NHK World Japanese Lessons

This website provides you with the reedited versions of “Basic Japanese for You” and “Brush Up Your Japanese” that are designed for the Internet users. Their original versions are on the air on NHK World Radio Japan, that is the overseas shortwave service of NHK.

Lessons in Japanese on WagaWiki

Part of TJP’s WagaWiki, this site offers quite a bit of grammar explanations, mostly at the basic and advanced basic levels. Note that the main page says later grammar pages are under continuing revision and aren’t shown but in fact if you click the link on those pages at the top the content does exist…

The Tanaka Corpus

The Tanaka Corpus consists of roughly 180,000 parallel Japanese-English sentences and is the basis of the example sentences found in the WWWJDIC dictionary server. It is freely available at this site for you to use in any projects you may wish.