Things helping you to learn Japanese

Learning Japanese can be fun. But you really need time, best would be an hour every day. I don’t have that much time, so I try to learn as efficiently as possible.

A very nice approach which gave me a lot of motivation is described in the book “How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyable, and on Your Own” by Barry J. Farber. I wish I had found this one earlier. The core is: Use as many teaching materials as possible and use them parallel. Learning a word in one book and listening to it on your audio cassette (Pimsleur recommended, useful but expensive.) makes you enjoy it a lot more. Use flashcards! Front side the word in your language, the backside with the original word. Use them whenever you have time, and you have more time than you think! Waiting in line at the cashpoint gives you a lot more time than you need to flash some cards. Listen to your audiocassettes when you don’t have a free hand. And last but not least: Try to memorize vocabulary by association or by creating a story which leads you to the right word, the more creative, the better.
So try as many different approaches as possible!