I think one of the first questions to you would be; Do you enjoy the ways in which you have been trying to learn the Japanese language?
In the end, if you can enjoy something you will always learn more/faster from it.
The second question would be, how long do you study each day? week? month?
If your answer is 1 hour a day, or 1 hour every 2 days or something like that, then your learning is going to be extremely slow.
I can only suggest things based on the way that I'm learning, so the list below is basically what I do every single day for 4 - 10 hours.
- Make sure you have a means to move things from your short term memory into your long term memory
You can use flash cards to do this, but making your own flash cards and keeping track of when to next look at each one is time consuming and boring.
So I would recommend downloading a program called Anki from here:
Anki - friendly, intelligent flashcards
If you want to know more about it, just click through the intro videos (He uses Japanese language as the examples in his videos anyway)
If you use anki, try to make sure you go through the cards every single day, it's no big deal if you miss a day here and there though.
- Make sure you know how to read and write at least the kana (Obviously)
- I personally used James Heisigs "Remembering the kanji" to learn how to write kanji.
(It will
not teach you how to
read the kanji)
For some reason that I don't really understand this book is quite a controversial subject, so I will just leave it at that and you can see what you think of it.
- Find some Japanese media/literature you can enjoy, personally I like to watch a a lot of movies and dramas.
If you find a drama you really enjoy you can even probably find the script for it here:
http://www.dramanote.com/
Dramas are great things to watch, because they will always be using natural, modern, every day Japanese (Of course there are exceptions, like if you happened to be watching a drama set in the distant past but you get the idea)
- If you feel as though you need some less technical/more lucid explanations of grammar then Tae Kim's grammar resource is great for this.
Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar
- Sign up to
smart.fm - The place you go to learn. and do some of the Japanese vocab lists on there.
(There is a plugin for anki which will automatically download a smart.fm list to a new anki deck)
- Make sure you listen to as much full speed, natural Japanese as you can.
You may not be able to understand it all now, but you will soon get used to the sounds etc. and things will seem to become slower.
- Find some Japanese music you like, music is great because you can put it on an mp3 player and listen to it on the go.
You can also look up the lyrics and even learn some vocab from it.
- Record yourself saying correct sentences in Japanese and identify the weak points in your pronounciation.
Shadowing has also helped me a lot with my pronounciation so far.
- Use
Lang-8 - Multi-lingual language learning and language exchange to write journal entries which will be corrected by native Japanese speakers. (Of course it goes without saying that you should be polite and correct others English too)
If you do this, pay very careful attention to any grammar corrections.
For some reason grammar seems to slip under the net a bit sometimes and people fail to pay attention to it.
- If your really struggling to understand something, just leave it and move onto something else, you'll come back to it at a later date and wonder why it caused such a problem for you.
- If you simply can't figure something out, post a questions here or on any other Japanese language forum.
Someone will be willing to help you out.
That's all of the advice that I can personally offer you.
I've never been to any classes or anything so I can't talk about them.
Other than that just be patient, have fun with the language, and eventually you will see yourself improving
