The Most Effective Way To Learn Japanese

Everybody thinks Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn, but it's actually one of the easiest! The two major hurdles are:
a) Most sentences in Japanese are structured backwards from English (eg. English: I'm going to the supermarket now. Japanese: Now, supermarket to, I'm going).
b) Japanese has 3 separate "alphabets" (including the Kanji system, with over 10,000 characters! Compare that to English's 26 character system, and you'll have an idea of what I mean), so it's one of the hardest written languages to learn.

So, in terms of grammar structure and writing, it's a hard language. But what's the major purpose of learning a language? It's to communicate, and to interact with the local people. And as a spoken language, Japanese is one of the easiest!

Once you get over the initial hurdle of everything being backwards, things start to make a lot more sense. The actual grammar used in everyday conversation is basic, and most people only use simple words in daily conversation. You'll find the quickest way to learn the language is to meet locals, and speak as much as possible. Mistakes are all part of the learning process - the more you make, the faster you learn. The biggest hurdle people face is they're too embarrassed to speak to locals. Don't be shy! It will help you improve much faster if you just make some effort!

Learning a few grammar points should be your first goal though - once you learn the grammar, you can apply it to almost any situation! Ie. You learn "I walk to the supermarket every day", and, using the same grammar, suddenly you can say things like "I play guitar twice a week", "I often watch TV in the evening", "I go to bars with my friends on Friday night" etc. etc. Lesson 1: learn basic grammar. Many people try to learn languages using phrasebooks, and remembering set phrases - but without actually understanding each individual part of the sentence they are saying or hearing, it's easy to quickly become confused (eg. A beautiful girl asks you if you "want to go for a drink", but you only learned the grammar for "would you like to go for a drink", so you don't understand the first part of the sentence, fumble, and you've missed your chance). Nobody likes to do it, but learning grammar is invaluable in comprehension, and gives you a much broader range of things to speak about.

After you've learned some simple grammar, get a vocab book, and a notebook, and start writing vocab down. Vocab is the key to being cool, and improving your expressions (eg. Without vocab, you could say "Hello lady, do you like to dance and drink alcohol?", but with vocab you could say "Hey baby, do you wanna sip margaritas and tango in the moonlight with me?"). Vocab includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. My favorite way to do it is to think about what you do every day, then write a list of all the verbs "wake up, eat, exercise, work, etc..." - then translate, and memorize them. Then do the same with all the nouns you interact with every day "door, shower, friend, racecar..." and the adjectives "cool, great, incredible, amazing, beautiful..." all of which can be translated as "sugoi" in Japanese... actually, it's probably not so important that you learn adjectives then, just learn "sugoi" and "ii"!

So now you've learned some simple grammar, verbs, nouns, and the two all-important adjectives, it's time to have some fun. Learning languages is not about tests, and long nights studying at your desk, conjugating the present perfect conditional and volitional forms of verbs... now that you can speak a little Japanese, there are 120,000,000 extra people you can communicate with in the world!!! It's time to open your mind, and get over to Japan! And when you get there, go somewhere with lots of Japanese people, get drunk, and talk to strangers. They'll love you, you'll learn a lot, and best of all, you'll make a handful of new friends every time you walk out the door.