jcdietz03 Wrote:初耳です。

Quote:You can get Aozora Bunko formatted contemporary works on torrent sites.

[...]
Do I just search 青空文庫[name of work] ?? How do you say "formatted" in Japanese?

[...]

A long time ago, forum users were talking about "innocent novels" and I had no idea what they were talking about.

Generally, search for "book name (青空文庫形式)" to find the correctly formatted text file.

These books are innocent, of course, as is discussion of them, so there's no reason to be concerned with them.
Of course, if you're talking about pirating books, you should take your search elsewhere, as such discussions are banned in these forums.

kapalama Wrote:

ktcgx Wrote:I don't know if I've heard of Aozora Bunko,

Way back in the early for Japan days of the internet a Japanese guy started getting all public domain works he could up in text form, and now the group as a whole at Aozora Buno is part of extended group working against the sort of copyright that stifles public discourse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aozora_Bunko

Thanks!

Even if the works are dated due to waiting til they are out of copyright, I think that shouldn't stop someone using them for reading, if they find something interesting. I might mention it to the Japanese department here, and see what they think of it.

CreepyAF Wrote:Sensei! Teach me nihongo, onegaishimasu! (｡◕ ∀ ◕｡)

I thought that this seemed like an obvious conversation piece, but after doing a bit of searching on the forum, I couldn't find any topic that fit it 100%. Please direct me to the thread if I've missed it.

Anywho, if you were to create a guide to learning Japanese from beginner to high-intermediate, what would your regime look like? What would the phases be? What technology/books/resources would be strongly leaned on? How long would it take? Etc.

I'm a bit late to the party, but here's my list.

1. Weekly 1-1 lessons with a professional teacher.
2. Daily usage of anki.
3. Annually take a JLPT exam.
4. Regular speaking/emailing with native speakers.

I think that everyone is in a different situation when they learn Japanese. In my case I moved to Japan to do JET without knowing any Japanese at all. I was really disappointed by the Japanese level of the other JETs I encountered and set out to fix it. This list is in order of importance of what worked for me in that situation. It's also in order of importance for what is working for me as someone living in the US and wanting to be able to use Japanese to give presentations on my research and things like that. I think that someone who is studying Japanese in a university setting will obviously have a very different list.

Overall, I found that on JET a lot of people got stuck knowing the Kanjis for their local train stations, asking for the bathroom, being able to say "samui!" to their students, etc. I wish more JETs knew about websites like italki and JOI, and knew how to effectively use anki. In my experience, being dropped off in rural Japan without tools like that doesn't really help you learn much Japanese.

As for reading, if you have an iPad/iPhone, then you can't go far wrong with the Wakaru app.

It can directly import books from Aozora Bunko and Hoshizora Bunko (not really sure what the difference is), and you can sort both libraries by easiness/level as well as the usual genre, author, and so on. You can also import your own books via the clipboard or as PDFs. Better yet, it has a Rikaichan style "highlight a word and get a dictionary lookup" feature built into it.

It also has a built in web browser, but I haven't used that a great deal.

It's not free, but it's one of the best apps I've ever spent money on, and it gets plenty of use.