6 Websites To Help You Learn Japanese Online For Free

6 Websites To Help You Learn Japanese Online For Free: "

Japanese culture has infiltrated the imagination of millions of non-Japanese people, be it via the explosion of Anime and Manga, the delicacy of the Japanese cuisine, the mystery of the Geishas or the fascination with samurais. For some fans of the culture, there is one thing that separates them from a real understanding of the nuances of the Japanese world – its language.

Now, of course, you could pay a lot of money to take classes, but for those of us who would rather just find a free alternative online, even if it’s just for the basics of the language, there are many options to choose from.

Below are some of the most helpful (or creative) sites to help you learn Japanese online.

Learn Japanese Language

One of the first things that puzzles students of the Japanese language is that there seem to be three entire alphabets that need to be learned when studying the language: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, the characters of the Chinese writing system. They are used together in most Japanese sentences and causes a lot of confusion.

One very good site for those trying to overcome this particular hurdle is “Learn Japanese Online”. The site presents each one with relevant cultural information, usage and even tutorials on how to do the strokes in the correct order for several of the symbols.

Tofugu

Tofugu , “Wonky Japanese Language and Culture Blog” is not your usual language website. It has been around since 2007, and is run by its founder, Koichi, who has a very creative approach to teaching the Japanese language. His idea is to educate while presenting tidbits about Japanese culture, and to make it entertaining to the point of absolute silliness.

Some of his videos manage to be incredibly helpful, while displaying some very YouTube friendly sense of humor. The site is also connected to textfugu, which is Tofugu’s Online Japanese Textbook, where many of the lessons are free and where he professes (with good reason) to have created an online text book specifically for the self-learner.

Japanese 101

Japanese 101 is part of 101 Languages, which is a site with resources for several languages. Although not a great site to learn about the nuances of the language, Japanese 101 has a nice array of vocabulary words as well as some nifty links to Japanese television and some related sites (there is also a forum, but the Japanese one seems to be non-existent).

The site is kind of a pain to navigate, since you have to constantly select “Japanese” from the various languages from each menu option, but it contains various articles about Japanese culture and language usage which could be informative.

Japanese Pod 101

Japanese Pod 101 requires a membership, but it does have a free option which will still give you access to a large number of videos, sound files, lessons and their newsletter, with extra lessons and free daily podcasts. The videos are professional and easy to follow and the forum is active and helpful.

MLC Japanese Language School Resources

MLC Japanese Language School is located in Meguro, Tokyo, but what is most useful about their site is the fact that they have downloadable PDF files of a lot of the resources they use to teach English speakers. They have even separated them into levels, for ease of use.

So if you need a worksheet to practice your Japanese letters, or an interactive Flash drill of some of the most common expressions, or even some extensive advanced materials, you can find it all here. There is also a nice collection of audio files and Flash materials with sound.

Japanese-Online.com

Japanese-Online.com has been around since 1996, and has an extensive collection of lessons, although some of its resources and links are outdated and the newsletter archive, although very informative, hasn’t been updated since 2005. Yet, the lessons themselves make this site worth visiting.

To have full access to the site, a registration is required. But it is completely free, unlike other sites which will only give you a few samples for free and then charge you for the lessons.

Do you use any other good sites to help you learn Japanese? Share them with us and arigato!

---

Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.

---

Similar MakeUseOf Articles

• The Best Free Online Grammar Resources (20 comments)
• Pauker – An Easy-To-Use Freeware Java Flash Card Program (14 comments)
• Improve Your Language Skills With Google Translate and Dictionary (9 comments)
• 3 Innovative Ways To Learn Or Improve A Foreign Language (8 comments)
• Use Memoriser to Memorize Information Fast During Work Day (8 comments)
• Top 3 Tips To Motivate Yourself While Learning A Second Language (36 comments)
• Teach & Learn On The Nuvvo Online Learning Community (5 comments)
• Students: Free Apps To Help You Excel at School [Mac only] (32 comments)
• ProProfs Toolset – Easy Educational Tools for Teachers and Tutors (7 comments)
• Learn A New Language With Anki’s Flash Card System (8 comments)

"

7 Video Editing Tasks VirtualDub Handles With Ease [Windows]

7 Video Editing Tasks VirtualDub Handles With Ease [Windows]: "

VirtualDub is the open-source and portable video editor that we have covered in the past for its ability to compress videos while preserving good quality. We also explained how Windows Movie Maker is able to do this as well, so this probably isn’t enough reason for you to go ahead and download the VirtualDub free video editing software.

In reality, VirtualDub has a lot of potential for the price tag it holds. It might not be a fully-featured Adobe Premiere alternative, but it certainly can accomplish more than a few tasks that you might think you need other separate applications for.

Let’s examine some of the features VirtualDub offers that might get you uploading your next video to YouTube pretty soon!

Splitting, Extracting & Joining AVI Files Without Re-encoding

VirtualDub has the ability to save a portion of an AVI video file that you have selected with the position slider, provided you’re in Direct Stream Copy mode in both the Video and Audio menus.

You can easily split videos this way or extract portions to be saved as new files.

Here’s another easy one-page tutorial on how to split videos with VirtualDub. To join files, open your first video, then head to File > Append AVI segment.

For more, check out the easy tutorial Merge Multiple Video Files with VirtualDub.

Cropping

To crop inside the video, first check that you’re in Full Processing mode and then click on Video > Filters. You’ll notice that there’s a Cropping button that’s not quite clickable (because it’s only enabled after you have chosen a filter).

We’ll add a dummy filter (click Add and choose Null Transform) which doesn’t do anything, but will ungray the Cropping button now.

In the Filter input cropping dialog box, you can experiment by typing any numbers to see what covers up the part you wish to crop.

In my case, I’m looking to crop the black bars above and below the video.

Cropping the black bars will change the dimensions and quality of the video, so I will use the resize filter to change the cropped video to the original video’s resolution.

Since the quality will be affected, even YouTube recommends to just use the original resolution.

Saving AVI As Animated GIF

There’s not a whole lot of free animated GIF utilities, perhaps because GIFs are old-school, but I still find GIF animations useful to illustrate articles. This is especially true when the steps I’m trying to illustrate aren’t long enough to make a video out of them.

So after you’ve loaded your video, getting your GIF animation is as easy as selecting the portion of the video you want to save by moving the slider (which is even an optional step if you want the whole movie as a GIF file), heading to File > Export and selecting Animated GIF.

You can choose whether your GIF animation will play once, infinitely or a set number of times.

The tool’s not perfect as I’ve been able to get a perfect-looking GIF animation after a lot of trial and error, but the shorter (fewer frames) your video selection is, the better the GIF might turn out.

Saving JPEG/PNG/BMP Snapshots From A Video To A Folder Or The Clipboard

This is very useful if you want to get thumbnails from your video. The steps are identical to those from the previous section, with the exception that you’ll export the selected portion of the video as an Image Sequence.

Before you do this though, it’s preferable to create a new folder so you can contain all of your images there because there’s no option in VirtualDub to make a new folder when you’re choosing your target folder.

If you’re interested in getting a single snapshot from a scene in the video and editing it in, say, Paint, you can easily use the slider to position it at the right scene, press Ctrl + 1 or head to Video > Copy source frame to clipboard.

You can then open up Paint or another image editing application and paste the image in. If you have applied any filters to the video, pressing Ctrl + 2 will get you a snapshot with the applied filters.

Achieving A Zooming Effect

What would take 3 effects (Zoom In, Zoom/Focus, and Zoom Out) and splitting the file 3 times in Windows Movie Maker to achieve a smooth zooming effect, VirtualDub can do with a simple filter from the VirtualDub filter site. Download the filter and add the .vdf file to VirtualDub’s Plugins folder (usually at C:\Program Files\VirtualDub\plugins, but if you don’t have that plugins subdirectory, just create one).

Here’s a great video tutorial (made by smokscren, which is where I learned this) on how to use it:

Basically, in Full Processing mode, add the zoom (1.2) filter.

You’ll get this screen, where you can choose the duration in frames for zooming in (Phase 1) and zooming out (Phase 2).

In my case, , I’m setting it so that the zooming in will occur from frame 0 to frame 100 (will start at the original view of 100% and then end at 300% zoomed in). I’ve also set the zooming out in Phase 2 to go from 300% view back to the original view (100%) starting from frame 200, lasting all the way through frame 300. That means between frames 100 and 200, the video will stay zoomed in.

Hit the Show Preview button to display the video with the applied effect. Easy peasy.

Adding A Transparent Image Or Logo

We have detailed how to add a watermark image in Windows Movie Maker. For VirtualDub, you’ll need to download and extract this logo filter.

You’ll be able to select any 24-bit bitmap file and drag it around the video using the X,Y sliders.

If your image has a black transparent background (like the next screenshot), you can type all zeros under Transparent color.

Type 255 in all of the Red, Green and Blue boxes when your image has a white background.

Embedding Subtitles Permanently

If you have figured out how to create subtitles or you have downloaded some from subtitle search engines, you can use VirtualDub along with the TextSub filter to embed them in your movie permanently, in what is called hardsubbing. Here’s a very detailed guide on how to do it.

If you’re using VirtualDub as your sole video editor, you could always ‘add’ text to your video by embedding it in the form of a subtitle file.

There’s a whole lot of filters that would make VirtualDub a super video editor but we didn’t cover here. If you know of any, enlighten us in the comments!

---

Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.

---

Similar MakeUseOf Articles

• The Top 5 Free Apps To Split Or Merge Video Files (23 comments)
• Media Cope – An All In One Media Player, Cutter & Converter (19 comments)
• How To Convert Your VHS Video Tapes to DVD’s using PC (26 comments)
• How To Compress Videos To Send Them By Email (10 comments)
• Digital Video Formats and Video Conversion Explained (10 comments)
• 7 Free Open Source Video Editors For Linux (30 comments)
• 5 Easy-to-use Freeware Video Converters (62 comments)
• Top Online File Converters (Video, Audio, Images …) (27 comments)
• Top 5 Tools To Make A Home Movie Online For Free (20 comments)
• Merge Multiple Video Files With VirtualDub (19 comments)

"