Hello, everyone! こんにちは、皆さん！
I skimmed through the thread and found some points where my experience learning Japanese on my own may help a bit.
If you're looking for a way to learn Japanese on your own
without having to buy books, CDs, or the like, please continue reading.
Although the last post was quite some time ago, in case they're still interested, and for the people checking this out, here's my ten cents' worth:
First, as the author of this thread stated, you
can learn Japanese through visual novels and animes. I totally agree.
This is how I'm doing it, and I've been having a blast for the past two years, killing two birds with one stone.
If you're looking to really learn Japanese on your own, then there are a few tools you'll need to arm yourself with before embarking on this perilous journey. If you're patient enough, then it won't be as dangerous for your computer and your head - high risk of getting infected by the urge to bang either, or both, against the wall.
Increasing your vocabulary and familiarizing yourself with grammar is the first important step, but you'll also need start on the basics of reading and writing at the same time.
I learned by picking up words from animes that kept popping up frequently, usually adjectives, and tried to confirm what I thought they meant with the
jisho (dictionary). Knowing how Japanese words are written in
romaji makes this task easier.
For this you'll need
zkanji - a totally free downloadable English-Japanese and vice-versa dictionary from
sourceforge. Having the
Denshi Jisho bookmarked in your browsers will also be very helpful. The feature-rich zkanji can be quite a handful, but it will be something incredibly useful and what you're probably going to look for later down this road.
For the Denshi Jisho, please remember to look way down the landing page (lower left) and click
Regular Site. The regular site or the old look is WAY BETTER than the new look for many reasons, but most importantly, it tells you the type of word (noun, verb, etc.), it lists down all the possible meanings for the word, and it also gives you the stroke order - how to write it - if you're really into learning how to write in Japanese manually (without the computer).
Another very useful guide is
Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. It also contains a lot of what you'll need to start with in reading and writing; tons of resources that are completely
free. Most of the grammar basics I learned, I learned from this guide. They also have the full manual on downloadable PDF so you can take it around with you.
If you're already well-versed with the
kanas and are now trying to expand your kanji list, then you'll need
Capture2Text (also free) by
Christopher Brochtrup. I cannot overstate enough how this tool has helped me learn kanji faster from reading raw mangas. (Switching periodically from viewing the English version of the manga to with raw version helps with the grammar, too.) It captures the kanji from your browser or PDF viewer which you can paste on to
zkanji or
Denshi Jisho.
To practice reading kanji and to memorize it,
ANKI is a very good tool. With it you can download lots of different learning styles for memorizing kanji. It even has a review where you can read full sentences in Japanese, further immersing you in
fun. Although
ANKI is very popular, there's a dark horse that I also love -
KanjiGold (also completely free). It guides you through the grades in Kanji with the kana, English translations, uses of the word(s), and a quiz-like GUI that tests you on what you remember.
I'll keep this until here for now, but if you need further information on places out there that have made learning Japanese
fun and
free, do let me know. I've spent over two years scouring the web for these precious gems, and all the kind-hearted developers who made all this possible deserve to have more genuine appreciative attention laden on them.
Long live to freedom on the internet!
PS
I'd really appreciate it if someone can let me know of a way to get animes with
Japanese subtitles instead of English.
hmmm... maybe i have a guide book and naving a text book of japanese, and i know some few of hiragana and katana, i mean is what i should do if i studied a kanji of japanese, because tthe kanji from chine (mandarin) is look diferent from kanji on japan.....
