How to Learn Japanese on the Internet

The Internet is a powerful tool for modern language learning.

Learning Japanese on your own can be difficult. Fortunately, learning Japanese at home is much easier in the digital age than it was several decades ago. The Internet offers a plethora of resources for Japanese language learning. If you know how to properly use the Web's multimedia learning opportunities during your Japanese educational experience, the learning process can often be easier than it would be with text alone.

Instructions

1. Set up your browser to properly display Japanese characters. If you skip this step, you will be unable to use some of the Internet's helpful websites. Many Web browsers are set to ISO-8869-1 encoding by default. This character encoding is often called "Western Encoding" because it is designed to work almost exclusively with American and European languages. Every browser's encoding settings are located in a different menu, though usually it will be under "Settings," "Options" or "View." When you've found the encoding settings, change your browser's encoding to UTF-8. This is sometimes simply called "Unicode" or "Universal Alphabet" according to Japan Info. With your browser set to UTF-8 encoding, you will now be able to view Japanese characters on the Internet and learn the language correctly.

2. Read text-based lessons at websites such as Japanese-Online.com and ELanguageSchool.net. Both websites are free and provide comprehensive lessons to basic Japanese writing, reading and speaking. Japanese-Online.com even provides essential information about Japanese culture and traditions, ideal if you are planning on visiting Japan in the near future.

3. Learn proper pronunciation to improve your Japanese speaking at OpenCulture.com. OpenCulture.com provides you with a number of links to audio and video lessons. These lessons will let you hear the language, spoken by native Japanese speakers, allowing you to hone your Japanese speaking skills.

4. Improve your Japanese reading skills by visiting favorite websites in Japanese. While online lessons are great for initial learning, simply browsing the Web in Japanese can help you refine your reading skills after you've learned most of the basic Japanese characters. Many major websites have Japanese versions available to the public, you simply need to replace the ".com" ending with a ".jp" ending. For example, Google.com is an English-only website, but if you go to Google.jp, the entire site will display in Japanese. This trick will help you learn as you simultaneously browse the Internet and complete daily tasks on the Web.

5. Connect with Japanese speakers and on text and voice chat services such as Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. Most well-known messaging services allow you to search public profiles, finding users with similar interests around the globe. Chatting about your interests and hobbies in real-time with Japanese people is a fun, hands-on way to test your Japanese conversational skills. This step is ideal for advanced learners, after you have mastered some of the basics of Japanese and you want to use the Internet to hone your impromptu conversational skills.

References

• Japan Info: Displaying Japanese Characters in Firefox

Resources

• Japanese-Online.com
• LearnJapanese.ELanguagesSchool.net
• OpenCulture.com: Free Japanese Lessons