I wouldn't make such a list. Drawing attention to really bad websites has an effect you don't expect: you actually increase the website's visibility, and you increase its search engine ranking. If a website is so bad that no benefit can be gained from it, the best thing to do is to ignore it.

I did make this thread a sticky for now.

I am suspicious of the negativity towards this thread. We have "what is the worst food" and other negative threads, but this one is actually useful.

There are good sites, and bad sites.

Practically, it is not possible to learn Japanese pronunciation using romaji.

Kana only takes a few weeks to learn...for some faster for others slower, but hiragana is only 60 something characters.

The longer you go using romaji, the longer it will take you to break the bad habits you develop, and will actually slow your learning down.

A link in your signature implies you are associated with the site. At least that is what I assume.

That's a good point. I'll consider it, but for right now it seems the tide is in favor of outing bad sites.

Of course, this site could inadvertently become a way of "shaming" sites into getting better. That would actually be a better outcome than just steering people away from sites made by people who want to help teach but just aren't quite skilled enough by themselves.

I am trying to make this website better. If I would have known I would have stoped my sister from posting links. There is lots of errors we didn't spell check all the areas of the website. Some information is missing and links don't work. We were in the middle of "under construction" but some people who use the website wanted it up, so we kept it up.

We really want to correct the problems and listen to your feedback about the romaji. As well as kana stroke order, we were in the middle of working on that, it is very important to know.

Even pretty much all the kanji are missing, we never uploaded them. We never created most of the images yet either.

I don't think you need to bother steering people away from bad sites. There are roughly one and a half bazillion bad sites out there about Japanese language alone. For example, randomly click a few links from these pages of links, and I'm sure you'll find things which are very similar to 123japanese:

• Jim Breen's Japanese Page
• Keiko Schneider's Bookmarks
• Japanese Language 日本語 ____
• Best Japanese Websites

The point is that nobody is ever going to find or visit those sites anyway. Sorting through all those millions and millions of "low information content" sites and telling people to avoid them is not a productive use of your time. It's better to make a list of sites which ARE worth visiting, and it will be enough work just keeping that up to date.

1. Are you joking? Jim Breem is the godfather of one of the best online dictionary sites out there. It is a high information...one of the highest information...sites on the net.

I visit this site every day.

2. Link dump: There is no content.

3. This one has a lot in kana. Nice. But is mostly a link dump.

4. Another link dump.

But can the same be said about the huge jungle of links there? I think that is what BenBullock meant. There are countless pages that are totally awful mixed in.

Just because the link itself is on a good page doesn`t mean that the content is good.

I think maybe Ben meant that the link he gave on Breen's site links to a bunch of other sites, and some of the other sites are not that good.

I know Ben and Jim know each other and have for a long time. The two of them are regulars at the same place on USENET. I highly doubt Ben was saying Jim isn't up to snuff. I admit that I read his post the same way the first time, too, and if I didn't know Ben and Jim knew each other, I probably would have stayed at the conclusion you made, MMM.

Please could you read my message before replying? :( I said " randomly click a few links from these pages of links, and I'm sure you'll find things which are very similar to 123japanese".

For example, at Jim Breen's page, I find the following dodgy sites (I'm deliberately de-linking them):

www dot omoshiroieigo dot com

That is about the same kind of thing as 123japanese.

Here's another one:

www dot ara-maa dot com

It's almost content free.

And, here's another one:

thejapaneseproject dot com


As it happens I was just writing an email to Jim Breen about some of the broken links there. E.g.

diagrammar dot photonjungle dot com

is now a domain squatter

www dot myjapaneselessons dot com

is a broken site, the Java is just spewing errors.

Don't forget to proof-read all your english as well. I spotted a few hiccups whilst I was browsing.