hesjapanese.com

This site offers fee-based online study, though there are some free materials as well (which require a registration). I haven’t checked it out too thoroughly, but it appears to be focused on lower level students.

JOSHU

JOSHU (Japanese Online Self-Help Utility), is a word that literally means “assistant” or “tutor” in Japanese, which is what this website attempts to be to anyone interested in learning the Japanese language. The goal of this project is to create a dual-purpose web-based Japanese language learning module, using HTML, web forms, and JavaScript. It will provide supplementary exercises to reinforce in-class lessons for the Japanese … [ Read more ]

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.

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 ]

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.

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.

eLanguageSchool.net

This site offers a variety of “courses” to help learn Japanese, including grammar, vocabular, kana, and multimedia. The site doesn’t appear to offer original material, but rather acts as an aggregator for good content found elsewhere on the Web, which can be quite useful.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT made an historic decision a while back to offer their course materials online to the public for free. This page is for their foreign languages and literatures courses where you can find various Japanese courses.

Nihongo Resouces

In addition to Japanese dictionary functionality, this website offers:

  • free online lessons at a university level (you need to know the kana if you want to take these lessons)
  • a free grammar book (almost 400 pages, PDF)
  • a good section for learning the writing systems, which includes history and useful diagrams
  • a kanji learning section that splits up the 1945 jouyou (常用) kanji into 5

[ Read more ]

Genki Self-Study Pages

This site offers self-study exercises (requires Japanese input abilities) that correspond to the textbook, ‘Genki – An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese’.

The use of javascript technology for the study exercises is pretty cool, though it may not be obvious that from Lesson 4 on you have to hit the enter key (not enter button) after entering your answers.

Live from Tokyo

Listen to foreigners using unrehearsed Japanese in situations that you too are likely to encounter in Tokyo.

Charles Kelly’s Online Japanese Language Study Materials

This site offers an excellent assortment of free-to-use online study materials, including:
– Japanese-English Quizzes in Romaji
– Japanese Kana Quizzes
– Kanji Study
– Words from Japanese Newspapers in Order of Frequency
– CGI Flashcards: Randomly Chosen Japanese Words for Reading Practice
– Matching Quiz: Words You Should Know
– Reading Japanese Signs
– Japanese Language … [ Read more ]

MIT Japanese Language Program Materials

As you may know, MIT has committed to putting all of their course materials online. To benefit from that, visit their Japanese materials site, which is navigable by year/course#

Tanabata

Tanabata is an online supplement to the Star Festival CD-ROM. By using the internet and its multimedia functions, Tanabata provides you with an interactive graphical interface to learning Japanese.

Tanabata was originally intended for students with at least two years of Japanese, but English translations and Furigana are provided for all of the text, so the most important element should not be skill, but rather … [ Read more ]

NHK World Japanese Lessons

Welcome to the NHK World Japanese Lessons web site!
NHK airs Japanese lessons for people of various languages on its international shortwave RADIO JAPAN service. On this site, you can listen to those lessons.

Languages included: English, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, German, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Malay, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Urdu, Vietnamese

Japanese-Online.com

Sixteen introductory Japanese lessons (for free) including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary for each lesson. Also includes free online message board and link to a free Japanese/English dictionary online. Also has links to Japanese software and other useful Web sites.