Master Japanese 

What you learn is important. How you learn it is critical.

People often say that Japanese is hard to learn.

Rubbish!

The truth is, Japanese is hard to learn how to learn. However, once you've got the techniques down pat, then you'll be making yourself understood in no time.

In a nutshell...

1. Don't kid yourself.  Learning Japanese will take a shit-load of time.  Be at peace with this.
   
2. Use deep processing to make sure you remember stuff for longer and keep asking people for feedback to fine tune your language on the fly.
   
3. Use spaced repetition learning to learn vocabulary.  The best option I've found so far is Khatzumoto's surusu which he explains here.
   
4. Become fluent at speaking Japanese by talking to yourself.
5. Improve your listening comprehension by (1) mimicking a person's speech ("shadowing") and (2) improving your vocab.
6. You can write beautiful Japanese.  Believe it or not, it's been done before.
7. Learn Japanese grammar by recording example sentences then listening to them over and over again.  Say them out loud as you're listening to them.  Also read Japanese out aloud.  The key is to make your mouth grammatical.
   
8. Learn kanji through Heisig's method.  Use surusu to stop forgetting the kanji you've learnt.
9. Like it or not, you'll be called upon to interpret someday.  Get good at it.
10. You're not too old to learn Japanese, you won't necessarily learn Japanese just by living in Japan and you're not Japanese.

Use the menu to start on the way to Japanese mastery.