Agatsuma wrote:do you wake up every day do your work or school or what ever. come home and studdy Japanese or is it just a "when i have the time" kinda thing.... for my New years rez im goin to work on it every weekend for a month becaus i dont know what my time is going to be like with school home work. once i got that down im bumping it up to 15 min. every night.
ARE YOU DEDICATED??
If you really want to learn Japanese, at my college we learned about 20-30 words per day (M-W-F) and each time we met the next day we were tested on it. Then of course we would have the quiz and you would have to know these words. In the beginning, she would say a sentence...you fill in the blanks with those words. Later on after you learned hiragana and katakana, you need to write out the sentence in Japanese. Try to commit yourself to learning 20-30 words a day, learn hiragana within a week or two and the same for katakana. It's actually not that hard if you keep writing it over and over and some people used flash cards. Then once you're past that, you will need to learn kanji. Try to learn 10-15 a week starting with the basics.
The books that we used at our university are the Japanese for Busy People volumes 1-2. Actually, of all the books I have purchased on my own, I really like those volumes a lot. You can find these in Amazon or eBay really cheap. If you are going at it on your own, I highly recommend getting a good Japanese dictionary (one for English->Japanese and Japanese->English). You can find how-to-do kana and kanji books easily. If you do get the books I mentioned (JFBP), then you may want to get the CD because it's good to know how to pronounce the words.
But the dedication on your part will have to come in memorization and needing to use those words and apply it. Know the words, know how to write it in kana and if you are ready, go to the next step which is kanji. Some people need flash cards to learn (they do help), I pretty much kept reading it over and over and took the quiz that's in the book and applied it.
I recommend going to school over learning it on your own. The reason is because you can use your language to converse with others who are learning the same time as you. If you have a large Japanese student population in school (moreso, those attending an English Institute than those who have been in college for many years) and make friends with them, a lot of them are willing to make you learn and most who know that will only speak Japanese to you. Most of all, you do not want to fail thus you are forced to learn so many words and kana. Where if you learn on your own, you go at your own leisurely pace and there is no pressure.
My only advice is to be careful with some books (yes, when I was a newbie, I used that "Making out in Japanese books" and sure enough...people knew I was using Japanese from that book). Be careful with learning from anime because you can come off very childish or really weird. As for dorama, also be careful. It's important to know the politeness level and not use everything you hear. If you see KimuTaku say Ja na for "see you later". you definitely don't want to say that to someone in a business or formal setting. Most of all...if there is anything that bugs me the most...people who don't know how to pronounce the words... learn how to pronounce the words. You won't believe how many people pronounce "anime" as (a-neem) or "Manga" as (mei-n-ga).
Also, there are Japan chatrooms where people who are learning type in Japanese ala romanized. If you don't have Japanese or people to converse in Japanese, go online to practice your conversation skills.
Good luck!
kndy