Yeah. Swahili, Traditional Chinese, and more of the usual stuff one can expect (German, French, Italian) but no Japanese. It sucks. I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I find it difficult to learn from tutes or CDs. That crucial human feedback is kind of lacking.
That said, I've heard a lot of people say good things about Rosetta Stone.
If you got any recommendations or anything, feel free to toss them my way.
Oh wow, Swahili?! WTF is up with that? You should teach yourself. Almost all of the Japanese that I have learned, I have taught myself.
Really? How'd you do that?
I couldn't say much on using Rosetta Stone. I've never used it. But for Japanese, I'd start with the alphabet, learn all the letters. Of course, that's basic. Here are
two sites that I used when teaching myself.
Install the Asia Language packs on your computers. That will help too.
There's a program called
"Translator Aggregator" that can help translate; and for copying kanji, you can always use the IME pad. The IME pad is a tool in the options of the language pack. This is "easy mode" for translating Japanese, works for everyone, however you should pay attention to all the translations. Using this will help by giving you valuable vocabulary. Use the sites above for learning grammatical usage correctly.
But this will only get you so far with learning, books will help the rest. You can also chat with Japanese speakers like penpals or something. A lot of people in Japan also want to learn English as well; there's a site I'm on,
"Japan a Radio", where you can meet people. Well, by "meet", I mean finding people online that want to learn as well. You can chat via IM, email, whatever works the best for you. This helps cover the human feedback part you miss from using programs.
That's just one option. You don't have to join the site if you don't want to. You can find someone on most message boards that can speak a bit of it, but some translators are dicks and they wont bother to help you out at all. Simply chatting in another language will help, you don't have to talk.
Finally, there's one more way I'd like to mention. Manga translations. Translating manga (particularly children's) will help you learn words. The most important thing with Japanese is the vocabulary. The sentence structure is based entirely on using nouns and verbs.
I dunno...maybe the Rosetta Stone might be easier, but like I said, I have never used it before. I hear it works well.
I was wondering...
Where is your 5-7-5?
Haiku thread, people?
Basically, learning (5)
Japanese is about you (7)
wanting to learn it. (5)
If you have the drive (5)
teaching yourself is easy. (7)
It just takes some time. (5)
If you mispronounce your words, people will likely help you out with it. But given that there that there is no one you can speak to, learning to reads fine. If you take classes, they will likely focus on reading anyways.
But back to business...Loli, I want a copy of this Touhou game. I don't mind helping with the translations...I want danmaku lolis.
