Beginner/Intermediate Conversational Practice (会話の練習)

[hostilecrayon]

I was a little surprised to find that the Kana and Kanji section doesn't really have much in it. Everything is either at a near fluent level, or in English. As I am in my second acedemic year of Japanese, I thought I'd try to start a thread for people aspiring to be fluent, but are still just starting out or only part way into their study so that we could get some conversational practice. Hopefully it catches on!

If you can't read kanji well, or just want something to check and make sure you're reading right, I HIGHLY recommend Rikaichan for Firefox, which is a built-in dictionary that you can toggle on and off. It translates any Japanese word you roll the mouse over - it's really helpful, especially for Kanji. Unfortunately, Firefox is the only browser that has this program, and I've never found anything quite so convenient. You can download it for free here: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

Also, my favorite dictionary reference site is www.jisho.org. It's nothing fancy, but it's very straight-forward and the dictionary has an astounding amount of entries. It is the first website I check when both of my crappy English-Japanese Dictionaries fail me. And they manage to do so quite a bit, actually. They have seperate pages for specific kanji details that are only a click away - and they even list whether the kanji is part of the 2,500 most used - and if it is, what its rank is in that list. It's neat, I think.

If anyone else has good references, feel free to add them in. Just try to put some Japanese in your post, too! After all, the more we practice reading and writing in Japanese, the better we'll get!

I'm going to start off with a generic little introduction that I've been practicing in Japanese class and wrote a couple of random questions, but if you don't want to do it, that's fine. It's just kind of a pain to be the first post in a conversational thread. XD It's nothing special, but hopefully we can get some conversation going and then we can have some fun!


今、日本語で。

始めました。私の名前はミラーアリシャです。二十四歳です。しゅみはビデオゲームをする事や本を読む事です。私のせんこうはしんり学とてつ学と英語です。そして、私のマイナーは日本語です。好きなどうぶつはとらです。好きな食べ物はピザやおすしです。よろしくお願いします。

君のお名前は何ですか。日本に行った事がありますか。大学か仕事に行きますか。一番いい料理は何ですか。日本語はいつか勉強しましたか。しゅみはどうですか。

[princessrisi]

始めまして　ミラーアリシャさん。私の名前はマリサです。二十二歳です。
ビデオゲームや本ピザも好きです
日本語でさ。。。上手じゃない。。助けてよろしくお願いしますだから。
去年日本に行った、五月から六月までそして十一月か十二月まで。とてもとてもとても楽しかった。
私の大学はブラドフォードにある。

ｍｓｎが使うか
皆が日本語は難しいって面白いって、好きですかと思う

[skyboat]

Good luck with your studies, rikai is a great firefox project, as far as dictionaries go I tend to just use alc.co.jp, Im pretty sure Jim Breens site searches it, never seen jisho before but if its built on JBs JDICT project then its got you covered. If you have an iphone the app kotaba is excellent.

Ive forgotten most of your questions now...

any way some other site worth looking at are;

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar#contents
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl ... to-fluency
http://www.renshuu.org/

First site is a good general online grammar.

The second site I listed there is very inspirational, the learn the joyo, and read read read is golden advice (disclaimer: This is my interpretation and not necessarily representative of the site authors actual advice)

And the third site is just a fountain of kanji JLPT and kentei crap.

Happy trails,
skyboat