What's the best way to learn Japanese (read and write) without actually going to Japan.?

Question

Any tools that you know to be excellent and helpful would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hang out with the Japanese community if there is one in your area. Go to the restaurants, book stores, etc. Try to conduct your purchases in Japanese. Go to libraries and see if they have texts in Japanese and leave notes inside that you're looking for a friend to practice Japanese with. See if there are any Kenjinkais (prefecture's people association) and go to their events, maybe sign up for membership and get active with them. The more time you spend with Japanese, the more you can practice true pronunciation and grammar as well as natural, casual conversation. Learning from school is great but "My name is" and "This is a pen" only gets you so far. Watch videos online at youtube and so forth. Get copies of music and the lyrics and practice listening to it. Try to learn at least the chorus. If there is karaoke available, go for it, don't be shy. Whenever you can, make friends with people of Japanese descent or straight from Japan. Their insight and pointers will be invaluable in your studies. If you have the time/money, there are also intensive classes. I believe one famous program is in the New York/New England area but I can't think of the name off hand, I know I've posted the link to it before in Yahoo. Good luck.

Answer 2

Free Japanese Lessons

http://www.japanese-online.com/

http://japanese.about.com/mmore.htm

If you want to learn Japanese, you've come to the right place! On this site you will find such things as the Japanese alphabet (including Hiragana and Katakana) as well as Kanji, Japanese grammar, sentence structure, and useful Japanese phrases.  More…..

http://www.freejapaneselessons.com/

Teach Yourself Japanese

http://www.geocities.com/takasugishinji/...

Answer 3

Try getting a Japanese penpal. You can try looking through Yahoo Groups for one. While communicating, try using only Japanese. You also have to learn the writing styles that they use. There are four of them. Romaji (Characters that we use in English), Kanji (The characters that look like Chinese and were derived from it), Katakana (Characters used to represnt foreign sounds), Hiragana (Characters used in daily language and also in furigana which is used to tell yu how to pronounce an unknown kanji combination)