Learn Japanese Today

You can find this station here.

Listening to Japanese as often as you can is important for getting good at Japanese. Just surrounding yourself with spoken Japanese presents you with an opportunity to absorb it without thinking about it constantly. That’s right, you don’t really have to focus on what’s being said to learn, I mean, it helps, but listening while you’re working out or writing on your blog can still help you become more familiar with the language.

So listening to Japanese is a good thing. There are lots of cool bands and CDs you can buy, so you should definitely start building your collection. But what happens when you don’t have your CD collection with you and you still want to listen to Japanese. Well, that’s why kamisama invented Internet radio.

You see, at my work, I can’t bring in my Japanese CDs and my iPod is currently broken, so I’ve been listening to a lot of internet radio. The new site that I’m listening to is called Armitage’s Dimension, and so far I like it a lot. It’s a station geared towards Japanese Pop/Rock/Anime music. The cool thing about it is that it’s entirely request driven, so the songs you hear are usually pretty solid.

Ease of Use: 8.5

The reason I first started using AD was that it was so easy to get started. You click the listen button on the homepage and there you are. You don’t have to make an account, although you should, and many media players are supported. Making an account is very easy, and then you’ll be requesting songs in no time. My only gripe is that the title of the song is listed last, rather than first, so it makes it tougher to find the song you’re looking for. Overall though, very user friendly.

Authenticity: Depends

The authenticity really depends on the song, so I don’t feel comfortable assigning a numeral. Be careful with songs from anime, especially theme songs, most of them are fine, but don’t learn about rocket-propelled grenades unless you absolutely have to. Again, this station presents you with real Japanese music, so the failings in authenticity are in the music, not the station. Therefore, this category doesn’t really apply, yeah Todd, thanks for wasting my time.

Quantity of Knowledge: 6

If you’re looking for anime music, change that 6 to a 9. Otherwise, keep it that way. The music database for this station is entirely user-updated, which has its ups and downs. There are lots of categories (like anime music) and artists that are absurdly fleshed out, while there are other glaring holes. For example, this stations displays a catastrophic lack of The Blue Hearts, one of my favorite Japanese bands of “Linda Linda” fame, but they have just about every album for another band I really like, L’arc en Ciel. Also, the fact that the database is user-maintained means that it doesn’t have all the late-breaking current singles from Japan. Instead, it feels like a favorite Japanese music playlist on your iPod, which is nice at times.

Price: 10

Oh it’s obscenely free. Have you noticed I’ve been reviewing a lot of free things lately? Guess who doesn’t have money to throw around…just kidding. I just generally feel that if you’re already putting in so many hours into study, it shouldn’t cost you a bunch of money as well to learn Japanese. P.S. I just bought myself a new sousaphone for marching around town, and it’ll be here in a week. *excited*.

Fun: 9.5

I really like the way the request feature works on this station. You can request something and then generally hear it within 5 or 6 songs. It’s not quite instant gratification, but it’s close. And if you hear a song you like, you can add it to your favorites, and then request it quickly in the future when you want to hear it again. It’s a lot of fun fleshing out your favorites and listening to whatever song is stuck in your head. And of course, it’s always great to hear any anime soundtrack you may want to, good times.

Overall: 8.6

Again, I’m going to stress the “greatest hits” feel this station has, as opposed to current stuff. But, by being entirely request based, you know that the song you are listening to is a song someone really likes, so its a good way to discover new music. Also the community on the website is pretty solid, and there are a lot of other Japanese students there. This site is definitely good at what it does, so I like it a lot. Too bad about The Blue Hearts…