I’m the first to admit that my Japanese ability is pretty ropey to say the least, however, although Japanese is perceived as a very difficult language to learn, in fact it’s not. The hard part is learning kanji (Chinese characters) - it would be true to say that to read and write Japanese fluently would take a long time and a lot of effort. During the process of attempting to learn the other two phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana I found a good website for practise http://www.realkana.com which helped me quite a lot to get started with some basic abilities (recognition of new symbols is like code breaking, reminded me of the movie “a beautiful mind”, i found you just have to keep writing them out over and over until you learn them (I also used some books for 4 year olds and card games (^o^) There is a partner site for kanji too http://www.realkanji.com. A good kanji dictionary is “The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary”, and in Japan the electronic dictionaries (“denshi - jisho” in Japanese) you can get are great too if you are seriously going for it on the language.
For me personally though, I want to be able to understand and be understood on a daily basis which means having some listening and speaking skills, fortunately this is relatively straightforward (compared with writing and reading kanji for example) and this is why I say that Japanese as a language is not as difficult as people make it out to be. There are some great resources for listening and speaking too, or at least they have worked for me (or are presently working for me). I highly recommend Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone . Pimsleur has figured it all out with the memory techniques I think, and although for the three part course you need to shell out a whopping $900 or be a bitlord pirate - (your choice) it is definitely worth it either way. You get 90 quality lessons. Rosetta Stone is a bit more fun and interactive and also a good method of retaining the language and also costs a whopping $300! That’s quite a sting, you can probably get them both for under $1000 somewhere with a bit of web surfing. You get what you pay for I guess. Obviously the best way to learn Japanese is to be in Japan and to require the language for your survival. Japanese language or social deprivation? I’ll learn Japanese! Motivations like that work every time.
