All right, so I will give you a little background about myself. I ended up taking three years of Chinese class at my school. I went through Chinese 1-3 during my 8th-10th grade years of middle school-high school. I ended up dropping it after the third year because I began to lose interest and could no longer motivate myself in furthering my Chinese learning. When I was in Chinese, anything that the Chinese teacher told
us to do to help us learn the language (outside of school), did not actually help. Instead, it only served to cause frustration, and ended up in causing us to be less motivated as a result. I am now going to start learning Japanese soon, but not as a class in school because we do not actually have a Japanese class. So, I would like to know, what are some good study strategies for learning to retain information from a language? I am really quite clueless here, and if I want to retain pieces of the language, I would like to know what actually helped/helps you to do just that. Also, if you have any online materials that could potentially help me with Japanese, specifically, that would be appreciated too. Thanks.

I don't really have first hand experience on this myself, but my professor once told me that it's effective to learn words that could be useful to you first, rather than the writing and grammar of it. It helps more if you could relate it to yourself.

Say for example, some yummy Japanese foods that you've tried? Learning their names would help, so I've been told.

Look up the word of your favorite animal in Japanese. Since it's your favorite, you would most likely remember it more than any other animal.

This is pretty much as far as my second hand knowledge goes. Oh, I suppose it helps to have a partner who's also learning the language and test each other on it.

Well?iv been trying to learn for awhile now and ill just list some things?that I find helpful.
first?you would want to learn your kana starting with hiragana learning
them from there romaji (there spelling in roman letters, IE: ABC)
counterpart. Then the katakana again learning them with there
romaji counterpart. And then just forget romaji as it tends to trip
me up when I deal with kanji. Then id suggest learning some simple
vocab, I find that the best way is thru the JLPT (Japanese language
proficiency test) vocab list. there are 5 levels N5 - N1, N5 being
the lowest and N1 the highest. as for kanji a good site is
kanjidamage they try and make it real simple, also on kanji watch out
for kunyomi and onyomi readings as they change the meaning of the
kanji and pronunciation. as for some grammar a good place to start
is tae kim's grammar guide. another good tool for learning is
anki, its a spaced repetition flash card program available on all
platforms (PC, android, etc) it good for learning. another android
program i find helpful is kanjisenpai it does a flashcard style learn
and its based off the JLPT levels. i know this just seems like a a
lot of info all at once (witch it is) but it should point you in the
right direction. I hope it helped. And happy learning!

sop281 : Playing games or watching tv shows in Japanese might help, you can also have little projects like cooking projects. I don't have much advice, but I hope this helps ^-^

sop281 : That's interesting. You can use a dictionary English and Japanese. There is a word in English, it translates in Japanese. Well I don't know if there is a dictionary like this. You could use Google Translate. I use it most of the time only if there is a word that I know in a different language, I translate it into English. You can ask people how to say per example 'Food' in Japanese, then they will translate it to you! I hope this helps

Watching not just Anime would help you understand the nature of Japanese, but watching a bunch of Japanese programming would help you out a bit. Eating Japanese food and what they're called, there's a bunch of options. Those are only the surface of what you can try, really.

If you can get access, try to find someone who has at least a basic understanding in a language. It's worth a shot. Also, try to relate the writing to something that you can comprehend in your own sense. For speaking, start off small and then slowly build yourself up into speaking in the language. Most importantly, slowly expose yourself to anything consisting in that language like games, television shows, flash cards, and etc then build yourself up at your own pace.

I was in Mandarin for the same years as you were, for 3 years as well. I did well, but my teacher had a fling for girls in my class, and he was White....
In my class we read dialogues, and had to make dialogues of our own using words and grammar from the chapter.?
My advice to an Asian language learner is to get a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge white board, eraser, and sharpie. Write the characters you recently learned, and write characters you've already learned. Practice writing the characters daily. If you don't really care about writing and need to read more often, then just write all your characters on the board or on a piece of paper and review daily.

If you had a teacher named Ted M., then message me. We could talk about our frustration bout him if he was your teacher

I took Spanish for 3 1/2 years straight. I took it in 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, and first semester 9th grade. I was actually approached by my Spanish II ( 9th grade ) teacher, and was asked to join her invite only period for Spanish III. I actually declined. I just was not interested in Spanish anymore. I could pass my tests. I could do all of the work. But I was not learning how to actually speak the language, so I quit. 

So yeah, I know how you feel. 

Japanese is much more difficult to learn compared to Western and European languages because their alphabet, when you dive into kanji or hiragana, is phonetics and not letters.  They also have characters like Chinese so you'll recognize the format but they're about as equal as Portuguese and Spanish.

If you've been taken language classes, you'll also understand the method of education for a new language.  Learn the alphabet, learn the sounds, practice numbers and basic greetings, learn the verb tenses and grammar, learn the conjugations, and polish with vocabulary.

Languages are tough to learn by yourself.  No one is there to tell you your pronunciation is right or wrong.  No one is there to interact with you and give you feedback.

You can memorize a few phrases and tell yourself you know a language but I believe it is essential to have either a native speaker or a trained speaker with you (or a program like Rosetta Stone) so you know you're correct.

Or just go to Japan and you'll be culturally immersed.  It worked for me.  I'm not great at it but I can slog my way through enough to survive.