RvTk (Reviewing The Kanji, and sometimes Koohii) is an invaluable website where students can share their Kanji stories and mnemonics. Perfect for the lazy and less imaginative, as I am. But once you finish RTK1, you might be tempted to switch to a more comprehensive SRS tool, like Anki. Among others, it provides online and offline reviewing, mobile apps for reviewing on the road, and many options to fine tune the SRS.

Learning a language is not easy. But it can be fun, spiced with games and comedy videos. Last week I found Google translate on iPhone/iPod touch (also on Android, but see below). You just enter a word or phrase in one language, and it spits out the translation in another. What’s cool is that the input text can either be typed, or spoken. And what’s even cooler is that japanese (and a few other languages) is on the “say it out loud” list.