I found a pretty nice site for learning dialects.

Check it out:
http://hougen.u-biq.org/

Thanks! That'll go to my bookmarks! I have been wanting to find something on the dialects but haven't commited any effort to actually look anything up. Especially kansai-ben sounds interesting. Perhaps because that's what I have been hearing everywhere for the last couple of months..

The problem with this kind of thing is that you learn a dialect asif it's just a matter of words. As we all know it's much more than that. Rather like student of English speaking in an American accent and putting in random British words, or vice-versa. A dialect is a total thing ,not about words.

But still understanding the dialect when you hear it is important. At first hearing "harahen" sounded very confusing and I still can't understand anything an older person tryes to tell me using his quite strong kansai-ben..

Of course learning to speak the dialect your self is a completely different thing..

If any of you are watching the current TV Drama "Bambino" with Matsumoto Jun, the main character is from Fukuoka. The actor had to learn a lot of Fukuoka-ben for his role. So the webpage is actually somewhat helpful, since it helps to figure out stuff when they are speaking Fukuoka-ben.

Admittedly, the characters' Fukuoka-ben sounds a little unnatural (IMHO), but I can imagine it'd be enough to get some laughs from a Fukuoka native. I kind of wish more dramas did this(i.e. have their characters speak the dialects of the cities that they are from). It gets a little boring sometimes listening to 99.99% Standard Japanese with 0.01% Osaka-ben thrown in for good measure....