What can you say about music?
To practice my Japanese casually, I have been using the afore-link-ed smart.fm software. But, when that gets a bit tedious, I use a streaming music website called Last.fm to aid the practice. Last.fm is a website that records your musical tastes based on artists and songs, and then creates a radio based on similar songs or artists.
Now, why not Pandora, or any of those other websites, you might ask? Simply put, it's because the range of music on Last.fm seems to surpass the rest easily. It's very hard to find Japanese artists on Pandora especially, which frustrated me for a while, whereas if you leave the Last.fm radio running for a while, you'll run into tons of new artists of any genre. I was introduced to Perfume, Kaela Kimura, sifow, Tommy February6, and more-- love at first sight.
Another thing-- music while studying. I find it best to put on a Japanese artist's radio when studying Japanese, and a French artist while studying French-- seems obvious enough, right? Well, I found this out when I started studying French on smart.fm, and I had Ai Otsuka playing on Last.fm. I could literally feel my brain tugging towards Japanese and away from French. Weird, huh? I'm not joking! Then I changed to Camille (a French artist) Radio, and the tug was gone!
Stop looking at me like that.
Well, in any case, if you need a musical boost-- for anything, I suggest you use Last.fm. Enjoy!
-JPOtaku
