Chances are if you are teaching English in Japan, you may be wanting to learn a little bit of Japanese yourself. Since my husband is coming with me to Japan, and he has no prior knowledge of Japanese. So, I am guiding him to some resources which may be helpful to others as well.
1) If you are complete beginner, please send me an e-mail and I can send you the PDF file of exercises and basic Japanese phrases and grammar constructions that I created for a beginning Japanese class.
2) If you have a basic Japanese language background that has covered a variety of topics: self introductions, giving directions, body parts and symptoms, home visitng, etc. etc... I thoroughly recommend the text that the department of Japanese uses at my university.
It is called Aozora. It's intermediate-advanced listening/speaking communication but if you are in Japan you probably have enough exposure to take something from it.
You can access the listening files for FREE at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/AozoraSound
The listening files alone are a great resource, but the text includes complete transcripts of the dialogue and organizes the vocabulary. I found it to be a great text. In fact, our classes largely just followed the flow of the text with extra activities and assignments thrown in.
3) Yahoo Jisho usually fulfills all my needs for dictionaries, if you do not have your own swanky pocket dictionary: electronic or otherwise. And if you have an iPhone you have access to endless Apps. Language learning does not have to be expensive.
