I am months late to the game, but I found this interesting Japanese-learning website set up by the Japan Foundation called Erin’s Challenge! I can speak Japanese. It has a few dozen short skits with copyable soft-subs in Japanese, kana, romaji and English and a bunch of Flash learning apps. The corny acting is so amusing. The website also comes in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean.

The Flash video player it uses to do soft-sub and line-by-line playback makes me wonder if a similar interface might be helpful for anime/drama playback. Everything is soft-subbed these days; maybe it’s time we do something with it.