Hi!

I really want to try out a new thing - I have a lot of great instrumental music that I want to listen to, AND I want to listen to Japanese at the same time.
Now, I know it´s not ideal, but I tried to mix an instrumental song today with a Japanese podcast and it wasn´t that bad actually!
My problem is that I don´t have any Japanese audio of high quality. All the podcasts I have contain a lot of background noise and/or music that collides with the song I´m trying to mix it with.
Do you guys know where I can find high quality audio of spoken Japanese, without noise/background music/etc.?
It can be anything - audiobooks, dialogues from movies/TV-shows, podcasts - you name it!

It would be fun to try this out! =)

Sincerely,
Zorlee

http://www.speaking-japanese.com/breaking/

Audio is free online, but the book is also really good.

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If you haven't listened to the Marimoeo podcasts, they usually don't have a lot of background noise. The only problem I noticed is that the volume changes pretty dramatically. The podcast is no longer being done, but they have left all the episodes on their website available for download as mp3s.

http://marimoeo.seesaa.net/ - scroll down to March 31, 2007 or before and click the DL icon to the right of the podcast player.

*Edit: added detail on current status of Marimoeo.

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The "Read Real Japanese" series has an audio CD (only in some editions, so choose carefully).

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This one is also a book with a DVD, but is interesting because it includes a lot of different voices speaking more naturally than the audiobooks:

Living Japanese: Diversity in Language and Lifestyles (Conversations with Native Speakers) (Japanese Edition) by Karen Colligan-Taylor

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The dialogues here are really short, and the audio is mostly English, but the example phrases are pronounced clearly with no background:

http://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/

Here are my recommendations:

http://www.podcastjuice.jp/

http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/library/index.html

There are 2 threads in the learning resources forum.

Audiobooks

and

A list of free GOOD audio.

If you search for them they have a bunch of stuff.

On topic, does anyone have a link to that site which features podcasts of Japanese men discussing various topics, with full transcriptions?

I'm sure it was mentioned on AJATT somewhere, but I lost the link..

http://japaneselistening.blogspot.com/
http://www.voiceblog.jp/japaneselistening/ ?

Sweet!!
I´ve used some of the audio from speaking-japanese.com in combination with some jazz-tunes I have - it worked out really well! =)
I´ll see if I can post a clip, if I could only get my internet connection to NOT break up on me every 5 seconds

Rip the audio off of all the anime/drama/hentai you have on your harddrive. You can use the extract audio feature in Subs2SRS.

Nice and clean, but I think its mono
http://www.tbsradio.jp/life/index.html