Nihongojouzu

becomingagun.com

Australian Japanese language learning legend Dougal Phillips has just launched a website aimed at helping people study Japanese. The site, becomingagun.com, doesn't describe what to study but rather how to study, and as the recipient of the 2005 Grand Jury Prize for the Japanese Language Category of the JET Essay Competition and the 1999 winner of the Australian Japanese Language Speech Contest the man knows what he is talking about.

Dougal doesn't mind slaying a few sacred cows (what Critical Period?) in his witty, pithy articles and his advice is pertinent to beginners and old hands alike. The site is worth reading just for this point alone:

You don't "pick up" a language! That's ridiculous. You pick up a pebble. You pick up a bargain. However, you learn a language.

iFlash downloadable decks

The iFlash website has a whole bunch of free flash card decks available for download (try the program for free for 15 days - it costs 12 bucks after that) I wandered through the 700 or so decks and found two particularly useful ones: the 3000 Heisig kanji (Books 1 and 3) and an 8000 card (!) deck chock full of vocab for the JLPT, divided neatly into categories (Level 1, 2, 3 and 4). Great stuff. iFlash lets you test yourself on a limited number of cards, say 50 at a time, but doesn't give you the option of testing yourself on exactly which 50...so i was thinking I would still have to use FlashcardSuite for that purpose when I realised that I could simply create categories of 50 cards each..problem solved.