They have audio for their magazines and books in Japanese.
You can find pdf files, too.
Awake! is readable, even if you're not into religion.
http://www.jw.org/

There are many more languages there, too, Chinese or Korean for example.

This might come off as rude.

Religions that promote shunning are bullshit; they break apart families over intellectual differences, and the sooner they disappear the better.

Thanks for sharing, buonaparte! That is indeed a lengthy source of audio - each "Watchtower" magazine reads over a full hour!

@Tzadeck, I cannot really stand them either, but that does not have to do with the "learning material" section and better belongs in the koohii lounge, or not on this particular forum at all, I think.

Jehovah's Witnesses thread

I think any religion is bullshit, I don't mind any of them as long as I can learn anything.
Where else can you find audio plus transcript plus translation for so many hours of listening?

[ファブリス]

Admin: Agree with KanjiDevourer. It's fine. Let's please keep out the religion flame wars out of here, and into the Koohii Lounge.

It would have been better if you posted the link to the actual downloads. However I see the website does not give permanent links for the Japanese locale, or the Japanese dropdown in the downloads page.

PS: Edited title.

You must turn on JavaScript to be able to chose a language.
http://www.jw.org/index.html?option=QBJrYBNQF
Older issues of magazines are removed, the audiobooks are there all the time. Sometimes new ones are added.
You can find some books and articles in html format here:
http://www.watchtower.org/e/publications/index.htm
If you want Japanese, just change /e/ to /j/, if you want Korean change it to /ko/.

I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, I don't believe in any gods or magic. Their site has been the best source for relatively good and complete language materials for me though, and not only for Japanese.
Thank Amaterasu for Jehovah!

Once a year they publish a CD-Rom with all their publications from 1970 to the current year, they are easy to copy and edit, you can make parallel texts, for instance. No audio there.
You can find some language versions (not in Japanese, but they publish it in Japanese too) here:
http://watchtowerlibrary.blogspot.com/20...chive.html
http://isohunt.com/

Tzadeck Wrote:This might come off as rude.

Religions that promote shunning are bullshit; they break apart families over intellectual differences, and the sooner they disappear the better.

You must lead a very busy life, telling off every person who mentions religion in your presence.

That's really amazing, thanks for the source. Really surprising how many languages they concurrently put out.

I always tend to read it "Jenovah's Witnesses" for some reason...

http://ifile.it/rpzn784/JW3xparallel.7z
It contains the following prallel Japanese-English texts:
My Book of Bible Stories Japanese-English.doc
Learn From the Great Teacher Japanese-English.doc
The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived Japanese-English.doc
You can convert them to any format you like.
You might want to use a mouse-over pop-up dictionary to get the meaning of some words.

The corresponding audio:
http://download.jw.org/files/media_books/my_J.mp3.zip
http://download.jw.org/files/media_books/lr_J.mp3.zip
http://download.jw.org/files/media_books/gt_J.mp3.zip

My Book of Bible Stories - original version with pictures:
http://download.jw.org/files/media_books/my_J.pdf
http://www.watchtower.org/e/my/article_00.htm
http://www.watchtower.org/j/my/article_00.htm

My Book of Bible Stories is very simple, excellent for beginners, the reader is very good.
Essentially, it is a book of fairy tales based on the Bible.

[ファブリス]

My bad, buonaparte. I didn't mean to ask you to post the many possible links.

I just thought they might have had a permanent link for the Japanese downloads page (which there isn't, they record the Japanese selection into the user's cookie, the url does not change).

Thanks for the extra links though!

I assume they have "witnesses" in Japan too, so the good thing is those are probably translated by native Japanese (just an assumption, someone who reads the material may confirm or infirm this).

Inevitable religious flame war is inevitable.

ファブリス Wrote:I assume they have "witnesses" in Japan too, so the good thing is those are probably translated by native Japanese (just an assumption, someone who reads the material may confirm or infirm this).

They have. They are translated and read by native speakers. And not only Japanese.

JimmySeal Wrote:You must lead a very busy life, telling off every person who mentions religion in your presence.

Well, I live in Japan, so I very rarely meet religious people. Maybe just one a month or so.

And, that's not what I do. I'm mad at religions that do specific things that are more harmful than average, and even then I'd only mention it under certain conditions. Anyway, if I feel up for defending myself on this point a bit later on, I'll make a thread in the koohii lounge like was suggested. I have a seminar the next couple of days so I have no time now.

Nothing against the second thread on a Jehovah's Witnesses website in the last year, but I do agree with Tzadeck. Although I am technically religious, I would gladly contribute Buddhism to the pot if it meant completely eliminating religion and the intentional ignorance it promotes from the planet.
Religion is an antonym for reason. It demands faith. Faith is accepting things as fact that contradict reason. People voted for George Bush and Sarah Palin for reasons of faith when reason would be begging "WTF?".
Again, a source is a source. If anyone has a link to The Satanic Bible with parallel Japanese-English texts, please contribute.

Please have the courtesy to discuss this in the right subforum.

*readies delete button*

I don't understand all this sub-forum math.
It all shows up under recent posts.

http://forum.koohii.com/index.php

....is the forum

The dark blue words are the catergories. The light blue words are the subforums.

I think.... lol

I've been using this material heavily. When people start asking me in any depth about how I'm learning Japanese, it's rather difficult to avoid mentioning this without leaving a large hole in the story. Either way, it leads to awkward situations =(

bladethecoder Wrote:I've been using this material heavily. When people start asking me in any depth about how I'm learning Japanese, it's rather difficult to avoid mentioning this without leaving a large hole in the story. Either way, it leads to awkward situations =(

why this material?Is it better than others?

jettyke Wrote:why this material? Is it better than others?

For what I'm doing with it, "My Book of Bible Stories" is the best material as far as I know.

Japanese audio + Japanese text + English text with:
- Reasonably natural Japanese, intended for native speakers. (I asked one of my Japanese friends on Lang-8, who thought there are occasional odd expressions but it's mostly fine.)
- Modern Japanese. (Almost all audiobooks are made from public-domain material. And almost all public-domain material is from before WW2.)
- Relatively easy on the vocab and grammar, while also having a decent number of kanji in it.
- Good-quality audio, 9 hours long, with dense speech.
- The three parts are all DRM-free.
- The Japanese text and audio match exactly.
- The English text connects exactly paragraph-for-paragraph, and almost sentence-for-sentence.


Other JW material has most of these traits.