Lazlo and I used some free Rosetta Stone provided by the Army and it was pretty sweet. It's definitely not something you learn overnight... we didn't get that far into it due to time restraints but I'd say if you know someone who has some sort of language learning software, you should definitely borrow it and set aside the time to get into it. I believe some libraries offer some language learning software as well, though I'm not positive. Depending on your determination, it'd probably be worth looking in to.

Rosetta stone can actually be amazing combined with a little bit of learning from someone teaching you.

Using that in my first year of high school when we had to learn French, I learned probably more French in those six months than I did in my previous four years before that class (then again, my French teacher back then was not very good at all...)



Unfortunately, since I didn't really care for learning French and learned it only because I had to, I've pretty much have forgotten all of the lessons by now, hahaha...

KG : That's awesome! I never knew Lazlo  used it! I am considering Russian since I'm Russian, have fun learning Japanese!

BluemageKyle : It was fun while it lasted, haha. Hopefully some time we'll get back into it. I'm dying to take up German again though. It was really fun and pretty easy to get a hang of, besides trying to make the sentence structure. A lot of it is really backwards from how we would say things. The words themselves though have a lot of similarities to English words so it's definitely easier than learning an Asian or Arabic language.

InsaneGamer : The thing that I never realized about Japanese that was interesting to get a hang of is that they don't have a symbol for each letter of the word. Each symbol represents a sound that makes up the word.

For example, for girl, the Japanese word is Onnanoko. In Japanese, this would be おんなのこ.

To take it apart, it's actually like this:

お makes the 'oh' sound. ん makes the 'nn' sound. So you have the 'own' sound making up onnanoko, pronounced 'own-a-no-ko', basically.

な makes the sound 'na', while の makes the 'no' sound. Lastly, you have こ, making the 'ko' sound.

So as you can see, once you know the word in English characters, you have to learn the symbols and pretty much just construct it by sound. However, these sounds have meaning as well. 'Onna' means woman, 'no' is piece that modifies the subject, and 'ko' means child. So basically, child that is a woman. A girl.

It's fun and challenging, but really satisfying when you get it right.

Edit: That example is actually in the Hiragana dialect so it may be different than what people were expecting. Kanji seems more popular with Americans/Europeans who want to learn Japanese and consists of a bit different symbols. Girl in Kanji is 女の子. So you can see that the 'no' symbol is still the same but the rest is different. I would start with Hiragana since it's easier to string together and make sense of, and easier to make and understand sentences since you can deconstruct the words by sounds and symbols so you know exactly what you're saying/writing.

Hm okay well I'm hoping to learn it and I'm very determined to do this. I don't have money or anything so I can't get Rosetta stone or anything like that. I'm just looking for really pronunciations so I can learn to speak it myself. Anyways thanks you all great help.

If you can't get a hold of Rosetta Stone, My Japanese Coach for the DS is a decent back-up. I'm sure it's not AS effective, but can still teach you the basics. It's a good starting point. Once you learn structure, most of it is figuring out what words mean. Having a dictionary for that is very handy. I recommend either using an Online Dictionary Server or a program like JWPCE.

The latter is really nice because it can assist in kanji look up.

From a speaking end, Japanese isn't too hard and its grammatical rules are far more uniform than English. Writing is also easy in hiragana or katakana... the difficult part is kanji. Memorizing kanji and learning to read it is the most cumbersome part of Japanese.

I know plenty of words, have to structure a sentence, how to speak and write in kana... but I can't really handle kanji well which sucks because there are some Japanese-only games I wanna play and those are always 90% kanji.

*stands by InsaneGamer*
I need help with Japanese too
For all the things I love most from Japan... Anime and VOCALOID.

Xenthou : ha nice Xenth Hm I think something like this should help. japan-guide.com

If i could i would, i would like to learn Japanese too so that nobody can know what im saying. I also would like to learn it so that i can speak a different language because it helps when getting a job.

Japanese... That would be cool to learn.
I could finally watch anime without subtitles! And read manga in its original form! And understand VOCALOID!

Xenthou : Same