Has living in Japan inspired you to further your Japanese education? Check out these helpful links. Many of these resources are free or at least have a free trial. This post is only meant to inform you of Japanese study resources available. Please do not feel compelled to buy anything just because it was mentioned here. There are plenty of free resources to learn Japanese.
JET Programme Resources
Japanese Language Courses (Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced) are free Japanese courses available for JETs. Similarly, the JET Programme offers an online Translation and Interpretation course (application in August) and an in-person one available to people who have completed the online course. (The link is currently unavailable on the JET Programme website. Please check it out when the website is back up.)
AJET has a Studying Japanese page full of resources. Did you know that a JET alumni made a Japanese language learning comic called Crystal Hunters Manga? This is one of the great resources that can be found on the AJET webpage.
Non-JET Resources
Tofugu and WaniKani
Tofugu is a Japanese culture and language blog. They regularly post things like the Best Hiragana and Katakana Learning Resources or the Best Kanji Learning Programs where they review popular Japanese studying resources. In the Best Kanji Learning Programs blog post, you can find a description of Tofugu’s own Kanji learning program called WaniKani. WaniKani is expensive, however, the first three levels are free. Their one-year and lifetime memberships go on sale once a year in December. There is also a very active WaniKani Community forum which can make self-studying less daunting.
In Kuma sensei’s Japanese Study Resources webpage there is a list of YouTube channels for studying Japanese. Japanese with Yuka is a YouTube channel that specifically focuses on JLPT prep. There are many Japanese teachers like Yuka sensei who post free lessons on YouTube.
As for reading, Tadoku is a website with free Japanese graded readers. There is also a website called Todaii Japanese where you can read Japanese news articles and do JLPT reading practice. You can toggle furigana on and off while you are reading, listen to the article while you read, and even see a summary of grammar points used in the article. After reading, you can also take a short reading comprehension quiz. If you use the free version, you can read up to three articles a day.
Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) has free (online and in-person) Japanese for Work courses for foreign residents. If you want to speak with your coworkers in Japanese, plan to work in Japan after JET, or self-studying is just not working for you, I recommend this class. Even in the online class (which is conducted over Zoom) you will have classmates and a teacher. Participants will study workplace Japanese, do a mock job interview in Japanese, and write a Japanese resume. This class is extremely high quality. It is kind of unbelievable that it is free.
