Hi, I have a long way to go till I am finished with this book but I was just curious.. When I get to the end, is there any..."help site" where you can practice with someone who is a native speaker? Practicing with anyone here would be helpful too, but there are still things I know I'd need to learn from someone in/from Japan. The only other thing I can think of is to find Japanese sites that I'm familiar with like Youtube & just chat with people there if possible.

http://www.lang-8.com/ comes to mind. But I guess there are many more "pen pals" web sites on the net.

Download Skype... post your info on a forum and offer to help teach English... and then await a message from a Japanese person, while you're sifting through the various people from other countries who will ignore the face that your post said you wanted to learn japanese and want you to teach them english anyway.

http://www.sharedtalk.com

Free flash-based site by the Rosetta Stone company, allows text or voice chat with random language learners. Also once you have a profile it "matches" you to a suitable language swap partner.

I've had many good experiences chatting to native Japanese on there, and the fact that you can talk and text chat at the same time is excellent for learning Kanji readings.

Hmm..those sound good, but I am a bit shy when it comes to speaking out loud to people online. Thank you though, I will definitely consider them

I guess I must get over it or else I don't have much hopes in becoming fluent huh? xD oh well - better get finished with this first book before I get into that!

You can IM with Skype too, which is what I do.

xAyakox Wrote:Hmm..those sound good, but I am a bit shy when it comes to speaking out loud to people online. Thank you though, I will definitely consider them

I guess I must get over it or else I don't have much hopes in becoming fluent huh? xD oh well - better get finished with this first book before I get into that!

With shared talk it's completely random people - not like you ever have to talk to them again!!

Or you could just text chat. Or ask them to speak in 日本語 and you reply in 英語, so you're both just practising audio recognition.