Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Japanese, but a student in the process of learning. These are materials I've prepared in pursuit of my studies. I make them available in the hope that my efforts may be useful to other learners, but without any guarantee that they are free from errors. Corrections are appreciated.

These pages provide Japanese native-speaker audio sources divided into manageable portions with English translation and a piece-by-piece literal breakdown, whose purpose it is to provide quick reference to the vocabulary and to expose some of the linguistic logic of the Japanese sentence. This is patterned after the practice used in Mangajin magazine. The intent is to provide practice with listening comprehension. A good strategy is to learn to say the sentences with comprehension at the speed of the native speaker.

Do not expect the literal breakdown to read "correctly" left to right. In particular, across particles such as "no", often rendered as "of", "A no B" would come out as "B of A" in English. The literal breakdown is not a substitute for an understanding of Japanese grammar principles. In cases where long translations exist for the Japanese (e.g. official English names of Japanese Ministries), a * indicates that the reader should infer the full information from the natural English translation.