“Are there any sites where I can look up a word and, hopefully, native speaker audio that I can download?”

http://www.forvo.com/languages/ja/

Not sure how comprehensive it is but I’m guessing it’s a good start.

http://www.forvo.com/languages/ja/

Not sure how comprehensive it is but I’m guessing it’s a good start.

Thanks for that. I’m honestly not too worried about accent right now as I try to pronounce words like I’m saying the individual corresponding kana. Right now, I’m more worried about me pronouncing parts that are typically left silent (like in です and でした).

As I build my vocab I’ll start listening to neutral accent podcasts and trying to sound like those.

ja.justin.tv for Japanese audio+video. I couldn’t find much on it, but for the past few hours, I’ve been watching this channel: http://ja.justin.tv/mkjobs01. It’s been some kind of variety show, with decent sound and video quality. No idea if there are specific times this channel will be streaming or if it’s maybe 24/7. Also unsure on the range of shows. Far better than Keyhole TV anyway (re-installed it tonight for the first time in a long time and it’s really pretty rubbish, so I thought I’d look elsewhere haha).

I’ve heard Ustream is good for that kind of thing as well but I’ve not had time to have a look yet.

As for J-Vloggers, thejapanchanneldotcom and gimmeaflakeman. I like the first; not watched the second much but he’s popular. Rachel and Jun are awesome :)

Thanks a lot for putting all of these resources together! I’d never heard of imabi so I might check that out. ^^ also, hi everyone ~ good to see you still around, Michael!

An app for Android I cannot live without is JA Sensei, I think it was like $4 but I don’t remember. But it also has a decent website at http://www.japan-activator.com/ as well that I think it rather useful for the small sum I paid for the app but I believe the website is mostly free with some features that you need to pay more for.

The app is what I love as I don’t generally use the site anymore. I bought a Nexus 7 tablet just for learning how to properly draw Kanji and this helped tremendously, and it’s essentially turned learning into a kind of game to me. There are other free apps such as Obenkyo but it didn’t keep as much track of what I’ve done plus the JA Sensei app has additional features such as a large list of vocabulary to go along with a very customizable listing of Kanji and Kana. My favorite ability is learning vocabulary which allows you to add the Kanji from the vocab to your Kanji lists for practice, and the Kanji listings show various vocabulary you can learn. It’s definitely not perfect in how it does this but after getting used to it, I can’t put it down. It’s become my all in one app for Japanese currently.

Obenkyo also deserves notable credit for a clean and simple interface(too many apps have childish designs) and good writing recognition, it has other features but it’s been a while since I’ve used it, plus it’s free.

Yesjapan.com is another Japanese learning site that is pretty great. I have one of their books but I mostly use the site for the chatroom, it’s really good for practicing talking with people, and there’s always a mod who’s advanced in the language to answer a question. I usually just sit in the chat while studying so I can start using new vocab in sentences with them to solidify the memorization or to ask about grammar points that I’m having trouble with. The owner of the site also does live streams on Japanese topics once in a while, which are definitely a nice treat.

What would you guys think of using RTK anki deck along side wanikani ? Starting to power learn vocab since it appears to be my biggest gap in understanding things but its hard without knowing all the joyo kanji and since im only lvl 8 on WK it will take like ~2 years to learn all the kanji that way..

This might be more appropriate over on the WK forums but thought they might be a bit more biased :x