I'm still pretty noob at Japanese, but I have lived there for 6 months and took 3 semesters of introductory classes. I've never had the motivation to study, but

I'm still pretty noob at Japanese, but I have lived there for 6 months and took 3 semesters of introductory classes. I've never had the motivation to study, but I thought I'd plug a really cool flash card type app called Wanikani [1], from the guys behind Tofugu. I maxed out the free level but I didn't want to dedicate my time to learning yet, so I haven't moved on to higher levels. I'm hoping this can be a way to develop my vocab, but I also like the idea from elsewhere in this post of finding some sort of radio broadcasts in Japanese, it would be super helpful if they had a text-based script of the dialogue too. Also, in my comprehension of Japanese on the internet, a firefox extension rikai-chan or the chrome version rikai-kun (which I use) is invaluable. With computers even Japanese people don't need to know how to write kanji, they just type the hiragana and hit space til they see it. This extension allows you to highlight the kanji, going in the other direction (kanji -> pronunciation/meaning, use your japanese keyboard to go from pronunciation/hiragana -> kanji with spacebar). Also, for a dictionary I use Alc [2] which I found is very commonly used by Japanese people that need to find English words. The main benefit to using this is that there are many examples of the words used in context, and showing other kanji used for those same meanings. This allows you to make sure the kanji you found for the meaning you want is actually used in, or find the correct kanji for, the context you are trying to use it in. It is important to have a database maintained by people that know proper Japanese for sure, it's much easier to understand broken English than to try to use broken Japanese. [1] http://www.tofugu.com/resources/wanikani/ http://www.tofugu.com/resources/wanikani/ [2] http://www.alc.co.jp http://www.alc.co.jp