Lang-8 Official Blog

Do you enjoy twitter?
It is useful for learning Japanese.
For example,”learn kanji”(https://twitter.com/learnkanji) is good for learning Japanese.

魚 — さかな — sakana – fish

You will learn a new word every day. Each word will be written in kanji, hiragana, romaji and English.
Hurry up and follow, to learn kanji!

Are you satisfied with just writing journals?

Do you remember what words your friends correctted?

It is important to review. Human beings remember only 26% of what learned in the previous day.I recommend you should review corrected journals three times.

You can review when you are free, or in the train. You can use Lang-8 mobile site.

Make it a habit to review!

It is hard to get a high score for the TOEIC test.Especially listening test makes the test very difficult.What are you doing to improve your English listenig skill?Do you know a way which you can listen to English for FREE?
My recommendation is to listen CNN.They speak English at a fast rate. It will be difficult for you to catch their words at first. Don’t give up,and you will be able to gives many correct answers in the TOEIC test^ ^

Do you have the iPhone?
We can enjoy many applications through the  iPhone.Some of them are very useful for learning foreign languages.
“iStudy” is a very good tool for learning Japanese,Scottish,French,Better: as well as others.For example,iStudy: Japanese Vocabulary is a Japanese study tool designed to help you learn more than 400 Japanese words.

Let’s learn foreign languages though the  iPhone!

For those who have a hard time with learning Japanese Grammar

Do you know this website?

http://www.jgram.org/index.php
(JGram is dedicated to helping people learn to speak Japanese, in the most effective interactive way: by communicating, sharing knowledge, and talking between Japanese and non-native speakers. This is an interactive community where you are encouraged to contribute your knowledge to our growing database of Japanese grammar. We also encourage you to spread the word and recruit your friends (especially any native speaking friends) to contribute. )

I think this website is similar to WIKIPEDIA. Both of these are databases, but in JGram,You can learn new words through many sentence examples and add a new example for every word. This is so great!
This is good for learners of Japanese grammar .

Kanji:1945 letters (in common use)

Hiragana:46 letters (and 3 symbols)

Katakana:46 letters (and 3 symbols)

Alphabet: 52 letters

On the other hand, in English;

Alphabet: 52 letters

only.

Most people learn Hiragana first, next Katakana, and finally Kanji.
Many people give up when they learn kanji.
Whether you can master Japanese or not depends on learning kanji.

Today, I ‘ll introduce Power Words.

Power Words is an application for iphone/ipod touch.It was created by ALC group, which manage the website for learning various languages.
The feature of the application is “spiral learning”. The words which you have difficulty answering will appear over and over again. So, you cannot escape! Every word is pronounced to inprove your listening and pronunciation, and for memorizing, you can learn by three ways, first, by choosing the correct answer out of three Japanese meanings, second, from three English spellings, finally, choosing the alphabets for the correct English spelling.

In this blog, I will introduce useful information for learnning languages(English,Chinese,Japanese,and so on) and pick up interesting  journals in Lang-8. Not only Lang-8, I’ll introduce another useful websites or tools.
There are many free language learning websites,so now we can learn languages for free.
Let’s learn foreign languages more pleasantly and more cheaply!

Everybody who tried to expand his own view for the world, strive to learn a foreign language. Since a very young age we are conditioned to search for a “course” or school, which will do the job. The mainstream educational system tends to avoid the usual, natural way of learning a foreign language.

For everybody is clear, that the kids are the best language learners and the parents are trying in every possible way to make the kids learn foreign languages, while they are still very young. And if you remember the time, when you were a kid, you will understand how difficult is to study a foreign language in class, and immediate after the lesson you are back to your native language, until the next day/week lesson. But if you have a friend, who speaks foreign language and you want to play with him – you pick up the language very fast. My understanding is that this is the natural way of learning language – by having a friend, with who you can talk, exchange ideas, discus things that are of common interest. There are no artificial topics, created by the book writer, or suggested by the teacher. It is just you and your friend – and your common universe, full with the things you have in common, or the things you always wanted to do. And not to forget – your “teacher” is a native speaker – this mean you can actually learn the real language in use, not some artificial outdated book version. …