How do advance my Japanese Skills?
 

Hello, I have VERY poor Japanese skills (I know Hiragana, Katakana and some basic grammar) not much vocabulary and I can only understand one or two Kanji.

I study Japanese at school, but I don't learn much there at the moment, as it is not an elective at the moment the class and teacher as a whole don't try as hard as they could. (It's an elective next year, so that should speed up my learning :D) I know in the last year of my Japanese study I will be expected to know 200 kanji.

My question to you is:
How can I speed up my Japanese learning and get ahead of my class?


As I am only very young (15) I can't go to any Japanese learning classes outside of school and my family hates when I speak Japanese. My brothers especially.
(Not so much that they can't understand it, but they hate Japanese culture in general. =.=" It sucks for me...)

How would you recommend I learn Japanese for my own benefit without taking any additional classes (that I must pay for, or that are out of my reach) outside of school, by myself?


This is a very difficult situation . . .

Any help appreciated, thanks :D

You can self-study from the free sources like, Tae Kim:
Japanese Grammar Guide | Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese

and, The Nihongoresources Book:
start [The Nihongoresources Grammar book]

If you use Firefox as your browser you can look into the Rikaichan plugin for reading kanji that you don't know yet.

You can also take a look at smart.fm

And you can try to find Japanese sites to read using www.google.co.jp

This is how I learned Japanese to start with and I did fine with only those resources.
Considering I have never taken a class I think it's easy for me to say that you will jump ahead of your class quite quickly if you put in enough self-study.

Wow! Smart.fm is set out really well, thanks!

Is Japanese Core 2000: Step One a good place to start on smart.fm?

I think on smartfm, the core 2000 is the starting set of vocab items, then if I remember correctly it moves onto core 6000.
But I haven't used it for a while so my memory is a bit fuzzy.

Did you teach yourself all the Japanese you know?
And are you fluent?

You seem very fluent, if self-taught ^-^" Thats amazing.

Unfortunately I am no where near fluent, because I am incredibly lazy.
But yes, I completely self taught myself, mostly with those resources I linked above.
Which is why I posted them :)

So, good luck!

Thank you for your advice and the web. I will try it. (But it may quite a bit difficult for me because it use more of じしょ系　that I don't quite understand yet.)

Well then you're in luck: じしょ form, as you'd guess from the name, will be exactly as they appear in the dictionary.

Wow, smart.fm gave me a really good first impression too. I need to investigate further. Thanks for that link.