this site is a good read
All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. and a different approach to learning language.
basically, his theory (proven to work) is that if you immerse yourself in japanese as much as possible, you will be forced to learn it. he talks about concentrating on getting then input as much as possible as apposed to the output (ie. speaking). because, for example, you are in Japan, sure you may know how to ask for directions, but once they answer are you going to understand them? It's kind of like how we learned our native tongue when we were babies, except now we have the advantage of knowing out to speak and move our mouths properly so we dont really have to concentrate on speaking, it should come naturally. It seems pretty insane and a lot of people will argue that after a certain age you cannot pick things up like a child anymore. I haven't tried this method myself but I'm looking into it, it seems to be working for him
