How did you learn Japanese?
 

I'm just interested to know how the majority of people learned Japanese. I've been self teaching for a while but I'm finding it very difficult, and I was considering getting lessons. Really I wanted to know how many people had lessons with a teacher or are self-taught, so I know it's not impossible to do it by yourself. Also I'm interested to see what method taught you the most. If you have used mulitple methods please just choose the one that helped you the most.

For me, it was by living in Japan.

im trying to teach myself at the moment but ill be looking into lessons in the next week or so

When I was in the United States, I took private lessons with a native teacher for 1 and a half hours, once a week for 5 months. It was very helpful and gave me a decent basis in grammar, hiragana, and building my vocabulary. But then I came to Japan and started studying full time at a Japanese language school 20 hours a week. We covered just about everything I learned from my private lessons within the first 2 weeks of language school. I've only been at the language school for 5 months so far, but I can hold very simple conversations in Japanese. I've gone out with some of the students at my school who are in the Intermediate and Advanced classes who've been studying full time for 1 - 2 years and they have no problems conversing with native Japanese speakers in daily situations. I'd really like to get to that level.

How about "All of the above"? I've used books, cd's, internet programs, flash cards, and conversations with my girlfriend. Now that I'm living in Japan I take a lesson every week.

all of them except native and visiting japan.

I'm still learning, but I'm teaching myself through books mostly. I don't trust the internet so much anymore since one site will say one thing and then another will say something completely different.

I live in Japan!!!! Well...only part-time, but yeah! Native speaker here!!!
Lately I've been working on my English...because it's poor...

My option isn't up there: in school.

From a book, which doesn't help with pronunciation.

I thought リー was pronounced like ライ, remember, MMM?

It also wrote "Katakana" in hiragana.