Hi everyone.

I've been curious to know which methods everyone is using to learn Japanese. I've been teaching myself so far. Well, I guess its self taught. I've been using something that most of you have probably never heard of. Its called Pimsleur. It consists of 30 audio sessions per CD. Each session is 30 minutes long. So far i'm on the second CD. I feel i'm doing pretty well but I want to try and speed up my learning a little. Pimsleur only focuses on speaking though. The people speaking are Japanese however so its really good. I recommend it.

I have started teaching the Japanese that I know to other people in my university for the past 7 weeks or so. Just a beginner class so it helps refresh everything in my head as well.

What kind of resources do you all use for this. I'm hoping someone might have a good method at hand.

Hi

Maybe read some of the threads before starting new ones??

All the questions you raised so far have already been extensively talked about here...

Please refer to this one, it has more information concerning this. http://www.thejapanchannel.com/Learning-Japanese/4117-Self-taught-Japanese.html

Oh, just a quickie here, as Mai in that thread said; I must agree a very nice source is Tae Kim's grammar guide ( http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar )
It WILL teach you well, and I personally love it, since it has been really hard to find a source that is as good or better than this.

Another source I would recommend is meeting a japanese person online. The only problem is finding them, lol

While I'm sure that Pimsleur is a good program, there are people like me who do not do well using audio-only lessons. I'm more of a visual learner, seeing pictures and reading words.

I'm using Rosetta Stone. What I do is, for each RS lesson, I list all the new words When the lesson is finished, I work on memorizing the words, then move on to the next lesson. I also organize the vocabulary into groups ('around the house', 'people', 'time', etc) and drill on each category at different times.

i have this book called Japanese for busy people and it really helps getting the kanji down. i used to go with a book called Japanese in 30 hours and it was good but it was more sentence building then words. i listen to Japanese for dummies its funny

In that guidetojapan website, with that taekim guy, is he a native japanese speaker or not? Because I know in his youtube it says he lives in USA but that doesnt mean he's not native, but he doesn't sound japanese *to me*... And since I'm trying to learn from native speakers to have a better pronounciation, well if he isn't I'd rather try to find other videos, and if he is, well the website looks great so that'd be good. Anyone knows?