Hi there, since I am planning on being a graphics designer, and since many major game companies work in Japan I want to learn the national language of Japanese. Also I would be able to impress many people at my school For right now I want to learn written first and after that spoken.

Uh, practice through repetition?

Make some small talk with other students using whatever vocabulary you possess, make flash cards (for those characters in particular) - Just use it whenever you can. Anyway since you're doing Japanese, just get the basic characters down so you can read on your own.

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You can recylce a book and turn it into a paper plate, But it always is and will be, a book.

There is a program called the Pimsleur Approach. It works wonders. It teaches spoken language only (no writing at all) so you can learn to speak with hardly an accent. I'm using it for German and Swedish right now.

Here is an example in Spanish. (I could not find a Japanese version.)

You want to learn written first and THEN speaking? What are you going to refer to the symbols as that you learn? To learn a new language, you should learn speaking and writing at the same time. It's the most efficient and natural way to do so.

Also, if you're going to use some sort of program to learn another language, make sure it's a context embedded one (which is how you and everyone else learned their first language).

One thing I found handy is watching English subtitled Anime.
Hearing the audio along with the translation can help greatly. But that doesn't help much with the written language. Still it gets you to learn part of the spoken. I've learned lots so far myself.

Yep, lots of authentic exposure to the language helps. Ever wonder why when we hear people of other languages speak, it may sound really fast? The human mouth is only capable of producing sounds up to a certain speed and that's the same across all languages (because, well, we're all humans). The reason it sounds so fast and hard to follow is because we're not used to the sounds of the language, thus we can't tell where one word ends and one word begins.

Watching an anime with subtitles might teach you a word here or there, but it's that constant exposure to the language being used in an authentic way (not just some person rattling off lines that you repeat, like in repetition exercises) that gets your brain used to hearing it and you begin to pick up sounds.

Oh, and remember, TC: it's going to take several years to learn the language, so start ASAP.

Kackle, I've been teaching myself Japanese for 3 years and I know a looot of free resources that you could use. PM me if you're interested. And I actually did learn how to write it before I spoke it, too. Learning the pronunciation and vowels system and the system of writing first, I was able to jump into sentences and be able to pronounce them correctly and all.

Learn Hiragana first (I have resources), focus all on that and use it in practice sentences. Learn katakana next and the differentiation between using it and hiragana. Kanji is a whole 'nother beast entirely, but learned right, it's easy

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"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty."

Pronunciation and the sounds of words have to do with speech. Thus, "Learning the pronunciation and vowels system and the system of writing first" means you learned to speak and write at the same time.

Point well made! I'm bad at expressing exactly what I mean sometimes. Haha

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"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty."

buy or download the ds game "my japanese couch i learned alot from this game!!!