ふぁんた時間: Free Japanese Audio
Thursday, September 27th, 2012
Often it’s hard to find really good Japanese reading and visual material for beginners through to intimidate for free. There’s so much on the internet that it can be difficult to get through all the search results to find the good stuff.
A series that I have found useful is ふぁんた時間. The site provides free, high quality readings of Japanese stories (and others) that can be streamed online or downloaded as an mp3 and played anywhere.
On the main audio page you’ll find a bunch of Japanese stories.
Each of the different stories has a few coloured buttons – the blue iTunes button links to a paid interactive storybook app (iPhone, iPad and Android), the green button links to a short Youtube video digest of the story and the yellow button links directly to the mp3 file.
All the files used to be available to subscribe to as a podcast but unfortunately that seems to be no longer around. If you use iTunes (or any other mp3 app), just download each mp3 and add them in to iTunes as you normally would with your music. I play them in the background while I am working to make sure I am listening to Japanese as much as I can.
In the menu on the left of the page are several coloured stars, which will take you to more audio and video stories. The green star has fairytales from around the world including Peter Rabbit and Little Red Riding Hood.
Here’s an example video to get you started. The rest of the videos are available to watch here
BTW – If these are too fast for you – search on Google for “slow down mp3″ and you’ll find heaps of apps where you can load up mp3′s that can then be played back at half or three-quarter speeds. These work great for when you are shadowing too.
Have fun!
