American wants to learn japanese
 

I need help!I always wanted to learn Japanese,but what do I know so far? Nothing!!!!!!Help!

I'm trying to learn, too. A friend of mine gave me some books to begin with but this site is free and may help you.
Learning Japanese - Where Do I Begin?

I found this Japan kid website. It teaches you some japanese there.

Find sites to help you first learn the two Japanese alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana. you can just type in 'learn hiragana/katakana' at google or something and get plenty of results. buying books helps a lot since you can easily study from them.

tYou wanna learn Japanese, huh. That's a big thing that you're wanting there. Japanese is hard, really hard. I studied it when I was at highschool in evening classes for 2 years. Then I started studying it at university and reaslised that everything I learnt before that was a tiiiiiny drop in the ocean. Then I came to Japan on my exchange year and realised that everything I'd studied in my 2 years of full time university was incredibly insignificantly tiny.

If you really want to do it then go for it. It's fun but it's a pain in the bum too.

1. find a good book. "Minna no nihongo", "Japanese for busy people" etc etc. I used both of these and they were pretty good.
2. Learn hiragana and katakana asap. It's like putting your shoes on before taking your first step.
3. DO NOT try to learn Japanese from Anime. You will learn weird words that no one uses/only samurai use/ only horny high school girls use.
4. Learn Japanese should be your podcast Bible.
5. Watch this; YouTube - The Secret to Learning Japanese! Amazing! not only does it have a moral, it's funny too.

Good luck!

omg! thank you all! it sucks to be clueless! i'll try EVERYTHING you guys suggested!:pinkclap:

anyone else?

yup don't learn from anime as you will also not learn proper grammar as well as useless(well not useless you would be able to read manga/watch anime better)vocab. But it might help if you are a samurai/ninja/horny high school girl :P

you can learn some japanese (like numbers and stuff) on genkijapan.net

One sight that is good for flash cards is realkana.com That will help you learn to read faster because it makes it faster and easier to learn the symbols.

I'd say use Roseta stone, but the interface for writing Japanese is the most irksome thing I have been forced to deal with. It does work, though.