Well Wakan is a great program, is a dictionary for bot Japanese and Mandarin, this page is also quite the help, <a href="http://tangorin.com/">http://tangorin.com/</a> , and the rest is with the NHK programs which come in a variety of languages, so if you already know something apart from English and feel more comfortable than with Japanese you can compare, for example from English to Japanese, from Spanish to Japanese, and then