Another one bites the dust…

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Yet another good language resource does the bait-and-switch tactic. So it appears my new series was a bit premature because smart.fm is being shutdown in favor of a paid subscription service. So know I need to rewrite all my previous posts. Total bummer! 🙁

Does anybody have a good recommendation for a site/tool for learning how to read Hiragana+Katakana? It should include all pronunciations including the voiced sounds and small や、ゆ、よ and some form of quizzes. SRS functionality is a plus.

20 thoughts on “Another one bites the dust…”

  1. Well I for one will not be subscribing. There are plenty of free online resources to learn languages.I do like http://www.kanacards.com for learning the hiragana/katakana. I bit basic and no sound but it gets the job done.

  3. Anki. Free and open source SRS software, will never sell-out, multiplatform including mobiles, awesome technical support, advanced features for Japanese (guess readings etc). There are premade decks for kana and kanji and Heisig and lots more, though the author recommends you build your own decks (and I agree).

    http://ankisrs.net/

  7. http://www.readthekanji.com/account/plans No sound. The free version includes all hiragana, katakana, and JLPT 4 words. The system uses SRS and is very easy to use. Plus, users can track their stats, which is pretty awesome.

    If any of your users were lucky enough to have signed up prior to their switching to a tiered pay system, they will have been grandfathered in (I thank whoever first linked this, because I got in beforehand and now pay nothing to use the full service).

    Anyway, of the few flashcard systems I’ve used online, this one is the best. It is also very addictive.

    • The site looks pretty good but how hard can it get to get some sound for kana? I mean, I did it with just a Japanese friend and a $30 usb mic. How will you learn how to read it, if you can’t hear it?

      • I think you could make your own Anki deck with sound files and post it as a public shared deck. I’ve never messed with sound files in Anki, but I know it supports them. They even have your guide in an Anki deck.

  12. Since I think Smart FM was best for learning vocab, I downloaded all the sound files for their Japanese Core 2000 and 6000 series (~12000 files) using DownloadThemAll and I copied all the sentences and vocab in text form as well.
    I had already been listening to the Core 2000 on my mp3-player before.

    Also, I think Anki has both Core series, but I never really got the audio working.
    I used to use Anki for RTK and I liked it.

  13. The free trial of HumanJapanese covers the kana really, REALLY well.

    I actually paid for the whole thing based on the quality of that content. Shame it ends way too prematurely with no sequel so essentially you end up having to buy all that beginner’s content again. They did say further installments would be made, and if it ever does get finished to a decent length (lower conversational even) then it’d be a very nice traditionally-ordered (ie: teneigo first) resource and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it.

    • Actually, now I think of it, if you’re planning to use Tae’s guide and a casual-first approach anyway, then the amount it covers would probably be very handy as a foot wetting device, y’know. I might’ve underestimated how useful it was to me.

  14. Yeah. I initially just used Wikipedia articles (including the ones on katakana and hiragana), until I got to the point where I felt I was ready to start learning words. That works for someone with an interest in linguistics who has studied other phonetic writing systems before, but I don’t know how well it would do otherwise. A free resource with audio specifically geared toward learning the kana would not go amiss, but the audio really should be provided by native speakers.

    Ideally, I envision a set of downloadable audio files, probably one file for each “row” (i.e. for each initial consonant), wherein the native speaker first pronounces each of the individual characters separately a few times and then reads a few words and short sentences (available in print form on the site) that feature the sounds in various contexts. That plus a good SRS would go a long way toward easing the beginning student’s acquisition of kana, I should think.

    Once I had a good basic understanding of the phonetic structure, I started listening to free audio from various sources, in order to develop a more authentic pronunciation.

    I also ended up writing my own SRS in Perl, with a web-based UI. I knew about Anki, but there were some things about it that really didn’t work for me, e.g., it gives you a whole bunch of new words at once when you’re not ready for them, instead of mixing them in one at a time as you review and letting you get comfortable with each one before throwing in more. Writing my own gave me full control.

    Incidentally, to anyone reading this, I am willing to make the source code of my SRS available under very permissive terms, but I wrote it for myself and have not spent a lot of time writing a click-click-click installer, so in order to be able to set it up and use it, much less customize it, you’d really have to know some Perl.

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