After stumbling upon this blog with very casual and personal posts on Japanese immersion, I decided to give what this post says a try: “Listen to 10,000 hours of Japanese over the next 18 months.” I wouldn’t want to have my J-Pop tunes on repeat as that would probably make me sick of them in the end so I resorted to Japanese internet radio.

livedoor ねとらじ lets you listen to various user-created streams in Japanese (probably since livedoor is a Japanese portal and that the Japanese interface would scare off 外人 がいじん Foreignergaijins who have nothing to do with Japan). The streams vary from anime and J-Pop music to Japanese rants to random Skype conversations.

You can sort the list of user-generated programs (as shown in the image above) according to listener count, title, name of DJ, air time and bitrate. There’s also a refresh button to update the list of current streams.

I listen to streams every time I’m not watching anything or listening to my iTunes library and that includes the time I’m typing this post. It’s not too distracting (well, that depends on what stream you’re listening to) so I suggest you also listen to this in the background while working. As for me, I also leave it playing while I lull myself to sleep. Who knows, you might pick up an expression or two.

I use the VLC Multimedia plugin for FireFox (which is an optional feature when you install VLC) to listen to the streams.

livedoor ねとらじ　[Japanese net radio]