Learn Japanese Today

Kuroda (黒田）is one of the 12 free online stations you can listen at MuMix.net .

This station is run by Michihiro Kuroda, popular J-Pop/J-Rock solo star, and former lead singer of the J-Pop group Iceman.

The station has mostly J-Rock, and they play a lot of stuff I like. There’s just one problem that it took me a little while to realize. It only plays Kuroda’s music.

I think this is an excusable mistake on my part, I mean, a lot of J-Rock sounds the same with the vocal boosters and reverb and the incredible use of synthesizers. The nice thing about listening to this station is you can basically base your opinion off 1 or 2 songa.

If you like Kuroda stay, if not, go.

Ease of Use: 9

It’s just 1-click and you can play it with iTunes and Windows Media Player. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Authenticity: 9 

I like listening to this station because Kuroda speaks very clearly and rarely sings very fast. This makes it easy to pick out entire sentences rather than the few words here and there that I usually get from rock songs.

Quantity of Knowledge: 2

If I was comparing this station to other Michihiro Kuroda stations, it would probably get a 9.5 or a 10 in this category because it has just about every one of his songs. Unfortunately for our friend Kuroda, there are other musicians in the world, and maybe even other ones you want to listen to. Sorry buddy.

Price: 10

I’m gonna review something that’s not free soon, I promise! I just got my paycheck…

Fun: 6.5 and decreasing

I got this number by averaging the score I gave after the first 15 minutes of listening, a 9, with the score I gave after the next hour of listening, a 4. Kuroda is actually pretty good, but it’s tedious to listen to any one artist for a long time, so use this station sparingly.

Overall: 7.5

It’s really not that bad to listen to once in a while. You just really need to know how to use moderation.

You can start listening to MuMix here .

This is less of a review and more of a public service announcement. MuMix is a great site I found for listening to Japanese music. There are 12 stations to choose from, so you’ll probably get something you like, and there are also a variety of singles and even whole albums available to listen to on the site as well.

All the stations play in a variety of formats and are pretty easy to get going, it’s pretty much just one click. I’ve been listening to a lot of MuMix stations lately because Armitunes has been getting on my nerves a little with all the songs in English as well as the insane repition someimes (i heard one song 6 times in a row once.)

On the front page, there is a big list of singles and then a shorter list of albums that you can listen to for free. Check those out too.

I’ll be reviewing some of the stations they have on there in the upcoming days, but they’re all generally pretty good. Just try to find one where you can hear the Japanese clearly enough to understand it.

Word.