Best way to go about learning Japanese?

I am a senior in high school who plans to learn Japanese in college so I can teach English there. I don't especially need to start learning it now, but I am going back to visit my host family in Japan this spring and I would like to be able to converse with my host parents. My high school doesn't offer a Japanese class, and if they did I wouldn't have room for it in my schedule. We do, however, have an online program offered through BYU. Is this a good idea, or a waste of my time? Has anyone taken online courses in Japanese, specifically through BYU? Help would be greatly appreciated...

Well this might help abit.. and its a start for learning japanese. Hmm how about lets start from the library.. There are books on how to speak japanese and all that or you probably want to browse the internet and search for some online japanese lessons. That might work^^ Well hope this helps in a way... This is how i pretty much learned japanese but still workin on it.. ^^ Heres another way go to like alltheweb search engine and type in japanese online and click where it says Japanese-Online.com^^


Ja Ne(seya)

Ive been using the pimslers japanese one, its audio and i have it on my ipod and listen in the car on the train. Good stuff for learning some basic language. I defiantly reccomend getting a Jp/Eng dictionary so that you can look up the words and see how they are spelled ( Sometimes its a little hard to hear a particular sound. we kept saying sen instead of sem) but you cant definalty get the basic gist of things

I think immersion (being in the country itself) is hands-down the best way to learn a language, as long as you don't keep yourself in a gaijin-bubble, you really have no choice but to learn.