I've been studying for about three and a half years. I'm by no means fluent (and have heavily underdeveloped speaking skills due to the methods I chose to learn with) but doing it the way I did allowed me to knock out the 2000 most important Kanji in about a year.

The other two and a half, obviously, were spent on learning the grammatical rules.

But, anyway, here's how I did it:

First, I picked up some books:

Let's Learn Hiragana
Let's Learn Katakana
Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary
Essential Kanji
Verbs & Essentials of Grammar

After working through the two Lets Learn titles, I started using this website to reinforce my recognition of them.

After that, I started working on grammar. Reading through the Essentials of Grammar book was mildly useful, nearly useless, as compared to simply reading texts with furigana included. One of my favorites for this part was visual novels. I'd speed through these things absorbing everything I saw. Best source for these is HongFire. Best to keep your Kanji dictionary nearby - do note you're not using the dictionary to learn the kanji, you're just planting a seed of its existence in your memory so that you have something to refer back to when you actually come across that Kanji during your studies.

Somewhere along the way I started studying Kanji. I worked through Essential Kanji for the first 7 or 8 hundred, and then decided this wasn't a very intuitive way to learn Kanji.

So, I switched my Kanji studies over to a (at the time, relatively unknown) website called iknow.co.jp, though now it's called smart.fm and is one of the better free online learning sources for language study.

It's around this point that you would want to find yourself a conversation partner. That doesn't mean somebody else who is learning Japanese - that'll just allow mistakes to permeate. You want a Japanese person who is studying English. The closest replacement, which doesn't really facilitate the function of conversation partners, is Rosetta Stone. I don't recommend it.

Start a Japanese blog, writing at least one sentence per day - it helps. More than you'd think. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing to reinforce your studies - some people translate doujin, some translate anime, some play visual novels, some find a job surrounded by Japanese speaking coworkers, some do all of the above. The important thing is that you're reinforcing your studies on a daily basis.

Also, on any day that you've been studying, make sure to get a full nights sleep afterward. Young children (specifically those in the language acquisition phases) sleep more than older people for a number of reasons, and one of them is because sleep is very important for the consolidation of new information. If you're not sleeping properly, you're just making this process harder on yourself.

If you've made it this far in your studies, then you don't need someone telling you what to do next anymore. You're now able to function, and everything after this is just adding to your lexicon and your understanding of structure and grammar.

It was around here that I actually decided to go to a classroom for my studies. I even started at 101 in order to pick up on anything I may have missed - and there were a few important things I failed to pick up on. The idea here, though, is that you must never let yourself get too confident in your understanding. There's always going to be something you missed.

Thanks for the the information. I plan to try and self-teach myself one day. I've wanted to go to Japan, but I've always told myself I need to at least know at least the basics before heading that way. Even if I start now, I probably won't even be ready for a good number of years.

I do have japanese for rosetta stone, and (aginst your better judgement) may still run through that while also checking out a lot of your suggestions.

I've always wanted to learn Japanese, so I could import games, and other wonderful things. Thanks for this.

But I could never summon up the drive to actually *start* learning. I failed Spanish II in high school, and there just isn't any modern language that interests me at all - at least not enough for me to make the investment to begin learning. Meanwhile I have several hundred dollars worth of books on ancient languages (Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Linear B, Akkaidian/Babylonian, Sumerian Cuneiform, Assyrian, Mayan Hieroglyphic, etc.).

Why did you start your studies in Japanese?

I've been studying Japanese in school for about 2 and a half years (In fact I just took my midterm yesterday for Japanese III). I know about 100 or 200 of the basic kanji, which while it may not sound like a lot, it's enough to be able to read a lot of text, and to be able to assume what some other kanji are based on the radicals in them.

I'm able to read all katakana and hiragana without problem, and read them fluently, as my entire first year of studying Japanese was based on being able to write out and know every Katakana and Hiragana on their respective charts.

I do very little studying outside of my class (except I watched some anime and worked on trying to translate it, and I try to translate some music every once in a while).

My class focuses on being able to read and speak in Japanese the most, so I have some pretty good speaking skills, especially compared to my ability to comprehend what someone else is saying.

For anyone who hopes to learn Japanese, I would recommend that you first learn Katakana and Hiragana (They aren't that hard). And then try to learn some basic grammatical structures before jumping into learning Kanji.

It's the first of many.

I've pretty much always had an interest in foreign language, but never had the drive to pursue it seriously while I was in high school. Wasn't until a couple years later that I picked up Japanese as my first in a pile of languages I wanted to study - Russian, Hungarian, Korean, Swedish etc..

The reason Japanese is my first is because I already had a basic understanding that comes from watching disgusting amounts of anime and simply being present on the internet.



Aaand this is pretty much the tl;dr for my post. In other words, the basic path is an effective method whether in a classroom or not.

I started a new method not long ago, but I think it takes a pretty good foothold on the language to really get the most of it.

Whenever I'm watching Japanese movies/tv shows/anime/anything else watched, I watch it completely raw. While watching, I write down (not type) all the things that are being said (EVERY WORD!) and translate.

I think this may be the most effective way (that I've ever tried) to study alone - it covers everything except speaking.

Just a note.

My Japanese teacher made us do something similar, we would often watch dramas, animes, or movies in our class, and he would tell us to write down anything that we can hear and translate it.