Learn Japanese Online - Looks Promising

Learn Japanese Online

"Learn Japanese Online
"for free with easy flash quizes

"Dear Visitor,

"Welcome to easyjapanese.org

"This site intends to provide useful tools for people who wish to learn Japanese online for free. First, there is the interesting Fujisan Kana Quiz testing tool. Learn how to write the hiragana here. If you masterd it, take a shot at the Kanji glyphs, using our flashcards. You can also play the fun memory game with a variety of difficulties.

"It is quite easy to start to learn Japanese. Select one of the links on the left that best suites your interest. For example, it's much fun to discover the different writing modes. You can use the script tables to learn the glyphs, then test your knowledge with the Fujisan flash quiz. While testing, you will memorize the so far unknown characters. So visit one of our sections:..."

Okay: the word "masterd" is misspelled in the first paragraph. I didn't notice until I went through the text a second time. The syntax is correct, standard, English. I think it's likely that whoever wrote the English text spoke another language before learning a foreign tongue, but what I've read so far is quite easy to understand.

My hat's off to whoever did the writing, by the way: English is my cradle-language, and I recognize how maddeningly difficult it can be to use correctly.

More, from the website's home page:

"...Japanese is unlike most of the western languages. It is mostly concise and straight forward. For example, there is no conjugation of the verbs depending on the person and number, and no suffixes for plural for nouns. Though, the writing is a bit more challenging. There are three scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji. The knowledge of the first two can be tested using the Fujisan Quiz...."

They've got a "Word of the Day" - today's "ohayoo" ("おはよう" "お早う") "good morning" - I very greatly appreciate seeing a Latin-alphabet version of the Japanese term, approximating its pronunciation.

I'm hoping that this website will be a useful resource, when I need to understand words, phrases, or passages in Japanese. Online translators are convenient: but I've learned that even the best 'mechanical' translations can result in, well, odd results.