Cooori is proud to announce a new feature to its online Japanese language learning system, the ability to listen to sentence audio. On top of the existing pronunciation audio available for words, the system now allows users to listen to native Japanese speakers read full sentences. This oft-requested feature is available now on over 2000 sentences, and Cooori will work hard to add more sentence audio.

Look for the audio icon next to a sentence. If there is an icon, you can listen to a native reading. Try to repeat the speaker's pronunciation to practice your own pronunciation and make a stronger word connection in your brain. As Cooori builds up its audio library look out for more audio-related learning exercises in the near future.

There's only one week left to register for the July 7th sitting of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). For those considering taking the test in July, be sure to consult the JLPT website to make sure the test is being offered in your area. Many students can be on the fence as to whether they should take the test. It's natural not to want to pay money to take a test if you can't pass.

If you intend to take the N5 or N4 level of the JLPT, the two months until the test is probably long enough to study of the test if you already have some Japanese study under your belt. Add the appropriate theme(s) in Cooori and pay close attention to the sample sentences to practice your reading comprehension. The system is designed to show you sample sentences that are appropriate to the level you are studying. Also, test your reading comprehension using the quizzes available for each theme. Success with the quizzes are a good indicator for success on the actual JLPT. Remember, a little hard work can go a long way in helping you pass the JLPT.

JLPT levels N3, N2, and N1 can't be mastered at the last minute, but you can still use Cooori to gauge your current level and make a judgement on whether you should take the test in July. Follow the steps outlined for levels N5 and N4 to gauge your vocabulary comprehension. You will also need to find ways to test your listening ability. N2 and N1 students should try listening to Japanese radio. For N3 students, there are many listening resources tailored for that level on the internet. A quck search for "JLPT N3 listening" in Google or YouTube will yield useful results. Cooori is also working hard to add more listening tasks in our system. Once you have an honest assessment of your own level, you can decide whther two months is enough to get you to a high enough level to pass your level.

Good luck to those taking the JLPT in July! For those of you thinking of taking the JLPT in December, remember that it's not too early to set you study plans.

Cooori is proud to announce a major update to our Japanese language learning website. The update features new features and improvements that will make using our system even easier than before! The Cooori team is always working to make our user's language learning experience better, and it is with great pride we introduce some of the major improvements to our system. You still get all the benefits of Cooori's online language learning system, but now access to all of our great features will be even faster and easier. The update comes in time for studying JLPT N2, N3, N4, and N5 coming up in a few months.

Improved Interface

We have made improvements to our interface which will make it easier to navigate the system. Users now have access to all the features of our system without ever having to leave the main page. No more loading new pages just to change a simple setting. We've also rearranged various elements of the main page to make everything easier to find. Finally, the entire interface has been given an injection of color that makes the system a lot easier on your eyes.

Improved Theme Management

Many users have complained to us about organizing their themes for studying. We've made it much easier to see all the themes you have subscribed to learn, and to add more. Themes are now organized as books, with each subtheme represented by a page from that book. It's now much easier to add and remove pages to learn. You can now choose exactly what you want to learn for each session without spending too much time in the interface. You can now start learning what you need faster!

Improved Notification System

Our old notification system could only tell you about the latest system notification. Our new notification makes it easier to see exactly which notifications you have already seen and browse old notifications. You won't miss any notifications, and you won't be bothered by notifications you've already read.

Cleaner Statistics

We thing that being able to visualize you progress is a very important motivating tool. In the old system, however, accessing this information was hard and the data could be confusing. Now you can see your progress clearly and quickly. Take a second to look at our new statistics window, you might be surprised at how much you've learned since you've started using Cooori.

Faster Database

Finally, the last improvement we've made to the system is to implement a new database system. This change won't be visually obvious, but users should now find the system to be more responsive and faster. That's because we've simplified the database structure that runs our system. The new structure will also make it easier for us to add more languages to Cooori in the future.

We hope these improvements help you learn Japanese even better. We're always working to add features and making existing features even better. If you have any suggestions for new features please don't hesitate to contact us!

Registration for the July sitting of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has opened and many students are looking for ways to learn Japanese online to prepare. For students looking to study for JLPT N3 there are many options available online to study for the test. Of course, we think Cooori is one of the best places to learn Japanese online, but today we want to discuss the pros and cons of online language learning. Online learning is still an emerging field so it's important to be aware of the potential pros and cons of online learning.

Pros

• Dynamic Content - One of the greatest advantages of online learning is the ability to serve dynamic content. Unlike a textbook, it's much easier to add new content and correct any mistakes in an online system. For example there is currently no official vocabulary list for the JLPT. If an official list ever gets released, or as the teachers become more familiar with the test online systems can quickly adapt their study lists. Cooori's own JLPT vocabulary lists are maintained by our team of language teachers and will respond to the changes of the test. A properly maintained online system never will never go out of date.
• Learn Anytime and Anywhere - Unlike a class, online courses and systems can offer a rich multimedia learning experience anywhere you can get an internet connection. With the growing popularity and power of smartphones students can do meaningful study in even cramped spaces like a rush hour train. The ability to study at times and places that were previously impossible means that students can learn more than ever before.
• Lower Cost - Online learning solutions have a much lower cost of entry because they require much less overhead compared to physical classes and textbooks. You don't need to be a big school or a major publisher to provide quality language learning tools anymore. These lower costs are also passed down to the user which makes language learning even more accessible.

Cons

• Varied Quality - The lower cost of entry means that a greater number of people can begin making online language learning tools. Over time competition will ensure only the best services survive. However, at this early stage of online language learning there are many new services and it can be difficult to figure out which ones are worth your time and money. As we mentioned in the pros, the potential for online language learning is great, but not all services can live up to that potential.
• Technology Dependent - While the content may not go out-of-date, it's possible that your phone or computer may become out-of-date for a particular system. Some systems only work on one system but not others which can be problematic if you decide to switch. Also, while the internet availability is increasing globally it's not 100% and people without internet obviously cannot make use of online language learning tools.
• Less Permanent - Even an old outdated textbook and your old notes can be of use today. However, once a online language learning service goes down it's very possible that your learning material can become completely inaccessible. Servers don't have the same staying power as a simple book, and students must be mindful that services can completely disappear in an online environment.

Many of the cons can be mitigated but both developers and users must be mindful of these problems. Cooori works hard to make sure its learning platform is technologically accessible to as many users as possible, and maintain high quality in its materials rather than simply use free solutions. Users must be careful when choosing an online language learning and be sure that it fits their needs and will not simply disappear. The potential study benefits for online language is very high, and we here at Cooori want to realize that potential and make language learning even better.

Finding good sources of Japanese listening material can be difficult for Japanese learners. While there are many good teaching resources for learning, Japanese learners can find it difficult to find real-life listening resources to test their abilities. For a long time these resources were not available outside of Japan. But now, thanks to the internet, it's such resources are accessible to language learners across the world.

Today, we'd like to introduce language learners to some Japanese radio streams and podcasts that can be helpful to advanced learners itching to test and practice their listening skills. Listening and understanding radio can be very difficult because there are no visual cues to help you, but because of this handicap it is a true test of one's listening skills.

NHK World is a radio service operated by Japan's national broadcaster. NHK World is actually available on shortwave or satellite radio worldwide, but you can listen to broadcasts even without special radio equipment. NHK Radio broadcasts programs in 18 different languages, including Japanese and English. NHK World's website can be difficult to navigate, and the Japanese content is hidden within the Japanese site. However, you can listen to NHK's Japanese news on demand by clicking the link. The Japanese newsreader speaks in clear standard Japanese, although the vocabulary can be difficult. You can also listen to NHK News in 17 other languages on this page. While the news casts differ between languages, you can still compare between Japanese and your language to help test your own comprehension. The English NHK World site also gives you access to free simple Japanese lessons for beginners and intermediate Japanese learners.

If you are in Japan, all the major commercial radio stations can be streamed for free on Radiko. The site is in Japanese, but you can find comprehensive program listings and listen without a radio. Unfortunately due to the emergence of Radiko stations that used to stream worldwide, are now limited to users with Japanese IP addresses. However, many Japanese radio programs produce free podcasts that are clips from their regular shows or original programs just for the internet. Stations like TBS Radio, Nippon Broadcasting System, J-Wave, and Tokyo FM provide podcast radio programs that feature a variety of Japanese celebrities talking on various topics. The style of many of these shows are more informal, and can give learners an opportunity to listen to colloquial Japanese that is often not taught in classes. Radio Nikkei also produces podcasts including a podcast of that day's headlines. The focus of the Nikkei is more business oriented and can be a valuable resource to hear business Japanese.

For those learners that eventually want to visit or live in Japan, being familiar with Japanese radio can help immensely with their listening skills!

Our goal is to make Cooori the
best site for learning Japanese online therefore our sole focus
is to develop new features that
will challenge our Japanese
students skills in different ways
and help them get the most out
of their learning experience.

One of our latest feature is our complete the sentence feature, where users will be tested on their reading and comprehension skills. Users will be shown an incomplete sentence with one word missing. The student will be given several possible words that may complete the sentence. The student will have to correctly recall the definitions of the possible words and figure out which one fits into the blank sentence. Once the correct word has been identified the sentence will automatically become complete.

Students will be given complete the sentence problems when they have a word logged in their short term memory (10 minutes). Thus, a student will have already seen the word in the traditional interface and responded "Yes, I knew it!". The complete the sentence problem will give the student another way to strengthen their mental connection to the word.

As with all learning features in Cooori, our artificial intelligence will ensure that every student gets a personalized sentence and word choices depending on which words he/she has been studying. The complete the sentence feature gives students another way to reinforce words in their vocabulary and process multiple words at once.

This new feature, which is already available to all students while they are learning words, not only adds a bit of variety to the learning experience but tests an entirely different set of skills.

This feature will also test how truthful students have been to themselves and the system since in order to complete the task successfully students will truly have to know the word in question very well.

Now studying Japanese with Cooori will challenge even more essential skills to language learning while remaining easy to use and effective to students needs.

Log on now and try this great new feature!

Learning a foreign language expands your horizon and enables you to communicate with different kinds of people. Language learning can also give you insight and understanding into new and different traditions and cultures.

An important day for couples is upon us, February 14th marks Valentine’s Day, an informal holiday where lovers share gifts with each other symbolizing their endearment.

In some places the holiday has a dramatically different take, for example, in Japan. Each year on Valentine’s Day, girls and women give chocolate to boys and men, and not necessarily to those they are romantically linked to. The chocolate even comes with implicit messages. High quality chocolate, called “honmei choco” (true feeling chocolate), is given to the woman’s romantic interest; however “giro choco” (obligation chocolate) is given to friends and co-workers.

Men who are often the more heavily obligated gender when it comes to Valentine’s Day in other countries, luckily catch a break in Japan, all they have to do is accept (and eat) the gifts, and perhaps deal with the unsubtle message associated with the quality of chocolate received.

Japanese women do eventually get their chocolate, one month from Valentines Day on the 14th of March when Japan celebrates “White Day”. Men are expected to “sanbai gaeshi,” (triple the return) return the favor and then some. The rule of thumb is triple return, as they deliver chocolates, cookies, marshmallows and other gifts to women who showered them with chocolates a month prior on Valentines Day.

We here at Cooori suggest that perhaps we should all take up the Japanese way of celebrating Valentines & White Day!

When embarking on learning Japanese online several free and open resources are available to Japanese students.
One of the reasons for this abundance of resources has to do with free data available to developers of Japanese language resources. However, both language learning developers and Japanese students need to be aware of the weaknesses of such resources.

Today, we will discuss the Tanaka corpus, a free collection of Japanese-English sample sentence pairs.

The Tanaka corpus was created by Yasuhito Tanaka and his students at Hyogo University. Professor Tanaka had each of his students make/find 300 pairs of Japanese-English sentences. The corpus eventually grew to over 212,000 sentence pairs. The original Tanaka corpus was released into the public domain, and the most current iteration maintained by the Tatoeba Project is released under the Creative Commons CC-BY license.

The open-nature of the project means that it has been incorporated into many different language learning projects. However, despite various efforts to clean it up the corpus suffers from problems that make it unsuitable for most Japanese students.

The original corpus included many obvious errors like spelling mistakes and typos, but also many non-obvious errors like unnatural or non-standard uses of both Japanese and English. Many of these non-obvious mistakes can confuse or teach bad language habits to a language learner. While many of the mistakes, both obvious and non-obvious, have been fixed over time, many still remain remain in the corpus.

For example, 私の忠告は彼女には無駄ではなかった。is a sentence which is translated very literally in English as "My advice was not lost upon her." The Japanese is not grammatically wrong, but it is a sentence construction that is not used in everyday Japanese. Furthermore, the sentence itself is difficult to remember and without more context, it's difficult to remember a hard word like 忠告. 忠告 can be translated as advice, but is often used in Japanese in the contexts of warnings or admonitions. However, the sentence and it's translation do not hint at this usage.

Because of the open nature of the Tatoteba Project, many new mistakes and errors can and have been added because Tatoeba contributors are not all properly trained in the appropriate languages. Unfortunately these non-obvious mistakes are very difficult to spot for a language learner and worrying about such mistakes can slow down the learning process. As one of our users said in an email that mentioned his own frustrations with the Tanaka Corpus:"It's hard to really dig in and do the work of learning if you're not sure that what you are learning is correct."

While it is easy for a language learning project to just plug in the Tanaka corpus data into their system, making a sentence corpus appropriate for language learning takes more effort.

When Cooori was starting out, we spent a lot of time trying to clean up the Tanaka corpus sentences for use with our software. However, our language team and our teacher advisers came to the conclusion that it would be far better to write specially tailored sentences for students in order to ensure consistantly high quality. While the time and effort we've spent to write our own original sentences is not a trivial one, it is a price we're happy to pay in order to live up to our high quality standards.

As we've written inour blog post about creating sentences for JLPT N2 words, Cooori takes great care to construct natural and helpful example sentence pairs for its products.

All Cooori users can trust our data for their Japanese learning needs.

Sources

• http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus
• http://www.manythings.org/corpus/warning.html

Learn the basics in 10 new language with our new language-learning game app, LingoWorld by Cooori.

LingoWorld by Cooori is a new language learning app for iOS iPhone and iPads which allows users to quickly and effectively learn common phrases and basic words in ten different languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Spanish and Thai.

Users can learn from the language of their choice, i.e. a French speaker can learn Italian in French, 90 different language pairs in total.

As trends towards mobility and globalization continue, being able to communicate in a foreign language is an important skill. LingoWorld allows users to learn languages in a flexible and interactive manner from the comfort of their mobile or tablet.

The LingoWorld app is designed so its users can learn essential words and phrases in a short period of time.

The app is built on a specially-designed Artificial Intelligence which adjusts to each user's learning ability, ensuring that each user gets the most out of even short learning experiences.

LingoWorld would allow a user to study basic French phrases while flying from Tokyo to Paris. By using LingoWorld several times throughout the flight,
the user would be able to communicate in French by the time they land!

LingoWorld contains the phrases necessary to take a taxi and direct the driver to a specific location, check into a room, ask for good restaurants, order food, pay the bill, go shopping in the market and make new friends.

Even if the user can't learn all the phrases quickly, all of LingoWorld's phrases are easily accessible via the Phrasebook and beats using a paper phrasebook in terms of convenience.

LingoWorld teaches 10 different languages so users will be able to communicate with a multitude of people.

In the LingoWorld app, users will also be able to practice pronunciation, look up words and phrases, closely monitor their own progression, develop language skills and understanding all from their mobile device.

So whether you’re planning on exploring the Italian Riviera, the Icelandic geyser’s, or braving the heights of Mount Fuji, be sure to download your very own LingoWorld app, the great language learning app and talking phrasebook from Cooori!

Download LingoWorld now for free from the Apple iTunes Store.

To read more about LingoWorld the new language learning app from Cooori click here.

Happy new year everyone!

We are excited for 2013 and have
big things planned including
several new features, updates and other changes to our product offerings.

One of the most recent change is our new London office which is located in the buzzing East-London Old Street'sTechHub.

The TechHub is a unique office space especially targeted towards start ups, generating a creative environment for the Cooori team to thrive and network with other start ups.

We are sure that in this innovative and lively environment great things will happen.