[alanX]

As much as I dislike shadow (sorry bud) ...he's right. The Japanese sentence structure is far different from that of English. (Exp: "The boy ate an apple." would change to "Boy apple ate" in Japanese. And usually the subtitles are changed even more by leaving out words to make it sound more natural.

So...shadow is right.



This time.



As for workbooks, I wouldn't do it. Even if you ARE going to buy a workbook, you should just torrent one for free to save a few bucks. And they're still pretty useless (at least in my opinion) unless you're an absolute beginner. There's lots of online junk that let's you practice your verb conjugations and things of that nature.

I think the base of learning Japanese is revolved around memorization. So buy/download yourself a Japanese-English dictionary, and expose yourself to as much Japanese as possible. If you have a myspace/facebook/xbox/playstation/etc/whatever change your language to Japanese. Watch tons of Jdramas. Listen to tons of Jmusic. Download a program called Keyhole TV that let's you watch Japanese tv. And memorize memorize memorize.

But don't rely on subtitles, they're only good if they're in all Hiragana (assuming you can't read kanji yet) for practice reading Hiragana/Katakana, other than that, they're pretty useless.

Hope this helped.