Does anyone know of a good place to chat with people in Japanese online? I have been looking for a place that would work that doesn't cost anything. Most websites I have found have a monthly fee to use their chat service.

Any help would be appreciated.

I'm not sure if you want to practice with other people learning the language or native speakers who probably won't even know much English. If you prefer the latter, I would recommend Yahoo Japan chat. I haven't used it in a long time, but it was free and I think there was microphone support too. I had to register in Japanese, which took a while, but it was worth it.

Download skype and join Japanese skypecasts.

Just make sure when you go to search for skypecasts that you filter by country/language so you can actually find the Japanese ones.

If you just mean text chat, you can get an irc client and go to #nihongo on irc.freenode.net. It's filled with some other people learning japanese. That's about all I know about it though, as I don't hang out in there often. Someone in that room did tell me about RTK though, which is how I came to find this site ^_^

This list may be useful for you.

I like SharedTalk, very nice interface.
http://www.sharedtalk.com/

A quick plug...
Here's an article I wrote with some other language-learning suggestions (not just for Japanese) including a brief RtK mention.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/pers...=207001070

-Ivan

ivantolearnkanji Wrote:I like SharedTalk, very nice interface.
http://www.sharedtalk.com/

That's great! Thanks!

I'm using http://www.livemocha.com for mandarin, but it has lots of other languages (including Japanese). There is an internet chat feature and it seems to be very effective about putting people together.

There's also Yahoo Japan chat, but the japanese version of yahoo messenger only works properly if you change the encoding for non-unicode characters. AppLocale won't work as it causes the thing to crash.

I can't say that the discussions were very interesting anyway, but there's a better pool of japanese speakers than sharedtalk. I guess you could proceed to some kind of language exchange in the 英会話 chat room.