Here's a online course to learn (haven't tried yet tho..)

http://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/
nice. bookmarking it i'll check it out another day though brain is fried
I've been studying Japanese for a while and I would say that it's not that it's hard, but that it's really hard to find conversation practice that is effective when you are not living in Japan. That is the one thing I have been trying to find for years x_x
cas (may i call you cas? lol) join livemocha, at the end of each lesson there's a review and then a written and spoken test, which fluent/native speakers review for you. so if you have a mic you can record stuff and someone will give you tips on pronunciation etc. i don't have a mic so i've been skipping that part but one of these days i'll hijack my husband's computer and go back and submit them all lol.
i haven't explored too too much but you can add friends, i wonder if you can voicechat with them. the site even suggests friends for you who are studying at the same level.
or become friends with someone Japanese and talk to them on skype or something :p

myself i'm focusing more on understand and reading right now, speaking it will come along naturally. i get how the pronunciation works anyway, the hard part for me i think will be words that don't have direct translation (like the way to say clever is actually something like 'sharp in the head')
but yeah i try to do one lesson per day, either livemocha or rosetta or right now the irasshai videos mostly, and then before i log off for the night i practice reading hiragana
Kanji question: what is this ⺶? I've seen it in a number of kanji like 差す、but I'm not able to figure out if that has any independent meaning that can be taken from it,
kawaiko i tried searching it on a few sites and i can't find anything *shrug* i don't know kanji at all yet


this guy is my new hero, he became fluent in japanese in a little over a year without taking classes http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about
so if you use LiveMocha (or even if you don't i guess lol) go vote for them for best language facebook page or something :p
http://www.lexiophiles.com/language-lovers-toplist/time-to-vote-for-your-favorite-language-facebook-page-2011
GesyPoodolo wrote: this guy is my new hero, he became fluent in japanese in a little over a year without taking classes http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about


He is so cool, and there are a lot of other people who have done things similar. In a way they inspire me, but I also have to be careful to not compare myself to them. *I'm not sucking at life if I'm not fluent within a year*, lol.
kika07 wrote: so if you use LiveMocha (or even if you don't i guess lol) go vote for them for best language facebook page or something :p


Voted! Thanks for the link. It has a nice list of language sites for a bunch of different languages.

Also thanks for looking up the part of the kanji I asked about :) I'm not sure it has a meaning. I guess it's just one of those things: memorize and move on, hehe.
haha maybe. but now that you mentioned it i see it everywhere lol so it's kinda bugging me too. maybe that character doesn't have a meaning itself but changes the meaning of other characters when attached to them. which would make it even handier to know :p
looking through that blog i posted and found a list of kanji with mnemonics (little stories to help remember them) it's pretty cool. it's like 141 pages though lol.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/kanji-files
click the link that says kanji keyword file

(gee i hope it's ok to post links like this haha)
Hi everyone :) This is an update on Skritter.

After using it for a month, I've seen an improvement in my vocab. Even though I wasn't wow'ed by the experience, the results are very apparent. I suggest that you do the free trail to see if it works for you. It's never too early to start learning kanji, but I would suggest Skritter for those who already know a little bit (like patterns or radicals) in order to get the most out of it.
My daughter is learning Japanese at school and after formally learning Mandarin, my sister is teaching herself Japanese. Although I know a little French, German, Manx Gaelic and Fijian, I am trying to learn Japanese well enough to travel there and get by. I would also love to learn Korean and enough of other asian languages to not be considered an inconsiderate tourist if I ever get the opportunity to visit any of these fascinating countries.
In the past I have watched documentaries on China and Japan and am now informally browsing through the history of these countries as well as others such as Korea and Taiwan.
Welcome BlackRain :)

Please feel free to ask any questions. We're all at different levels and have different goals.

You already have a good start with language acquisition. I wish I knew all the languages you do :)
hey ppl. i'm glad to this thread is still thriving. i tried live mocha and i really like it. much better than rosetta stone imo. i only used it once but it looks like i'm gonna be using it alot more in the future. i don't think i'm gonna be trying my hand at kanji just yet.

there should be a way to just catalog all the links/ online resources that we have posted and will add in the future to this thread or else all of them will get lost in the back pages of the thread as it progresses.