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How do I begin learning japanese?

It will be difficult to find someone to teach you Japanese, unless that is you happen to pay them.

There are a lot of different methods to learning Japanese, you have to find one that works for you. Japanese is a difficult language, but not an impossible language, but you must look at it as something that you are always learning, rather than something you learn once and remember, like riding a bicycle.

First, I recommend getting a good book/audio combo, much good has been said of Genki (An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese).

Next, you'll want to get something to help you understand the very basic characters sets representing syllables in Japanese, katakana & hiragana, they'll be the foundation on which you learn the rest of the writing system, much also has been said of Remembering the Kana. It's important to begin learning these character sets quite early, rather than relying on roumaji, or romanized Japanese.

One of the great secret pleasures of learning Japanese is that manga, or Japanese serial illustrated comics, present the learner with a wide variety of colloquial and natural sounding Japanese. It will be a while before you can read actual manga written for a Japanese audience, but you can digest the translations of these in a great set of books by a group of people who used to put out a magazine dedicated just to that, called Mangajin. This is where my start with Japanese began, sometime back in the early 90's. Unfortunately these are out of print, (ebay link included), but you can also get a couple of very fine books they put out, titlted, Basic Japanese through Comics 1 & Basic Japanese through Comics 2. They can be excellent guides to common Japanese that often gets glossed over in more formal texts.

Last, immerse yourself as much as you can in music & movies & whatever resources you can gather such as news on the internet. You can find a lot of different streaming news & entertainment channels.

You have to get yourself used to what actual daily Japanese news & conversation sounds like. The audio supplement to Japanese books pale in comparison to the real thing. The best advice I can give you is to study, study and study some more. See if there is a Japanese language group that meets in your area, one where both English & Japanese speakers meet--- interaction with someone who speaks the language will help render those hard-to-decifer grammatical puzzles that much easier to understand.

Goodluck. & 頑張る (ganbaru!)
 
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Oh I will also say, that this forum is an excelent resource for asking specific questions about the language itself, and there are many friendly and knowledgeable people who can help you.

Again, goodluck.
 
The first thing to do is to learn Hiragana.

Hiragana home

If you do not have a Japanese person to practice with, find a friend, and practice your Japanese on each other.
 
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