Learning Japanese - It’s 2008: Use technology to help!

I said a while ago that I moved, well, part of that has involved learning a new language. Following the martial arts maxim,

Do not seek to just blindly copy and emulate your teachers, instead seek what they sought.

I set about trying to find the tools and strategy that worked best for me to accomplish the goal of learning a new language quickly and well.

I found that the king of SRS (spaced repetition systems) and Japanese language learning tools is the humble PDA

So, First go to http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/ and get an Axim loaded to the gills with Japanese - English dictionaries. Then get bazillions of example sentences from ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/jp_examples.fpw.tar.gz and stick that on the PDA’s SD Card (get a big one, the bigger the better)

Once that’s done you have a Japanese-English-Kanji-Stroke order-readings etc Dictionary that easily outperforms any of the commercial J-E ‘Wordtank’ kind of dictionaries,you can add further pimpage too by adding the worlds finest SRS　on it by adding PocketStackz from http://www.stackz.com/Stackz/ppc/ppc.htm
after that’s installed add the vocabulary files from http://www.stackz.com/Stackz/Archive/Archive.php

That’s well on the way to being the King of language learning helpers, but adding Declan’s voice flash cards (Yes: VOICE, they speak the words at you!) and the Kanji software will quite honestly put you over the edge!! get them from here -
http://www.declan-software.com/pocket_pc/japanese/index.htm

The Declans and Stackz site has files for all the JLPT levels and quite frankly, any words you’d ever need!

Free trials are available for all the software listed above (Obviously not the Axim)

Good luck!

NB: I am in no way affiliated with these sites, but I do fully recommend the products.