Rosetta stone.

[pussenboots]

I would recommend staying away from romanji versions of texts. I would learn hiragana and katana as a first resort, then get texts in kana, otherwise you will not be annunciating correctly. I lived and worked in Tokyo for 3 years, passed the lvl 3 exam after my first. But as for studying methods, everyone is different, for me I would just continually rewrite things to lock it in my brain. I made flash cards for with hiragana on one side and romaji phoneme on the other, then switched it to hiragana on one side and katakana on the other and would just practice those on the trains in the morning and night. I will have to dig through my boxes, but I had some very good business Japanese texts, was a little more appropriate than just learning social conversational, will come back and let you know the name of them in case you are interested.

[Demosthenes11]

I laugh every time a white nerd starts learning japanese. so many have wet dreams about that shitty culture.

best advice I can give for learning a language like this is take the time it takes. shits hard, it takes time, you will need to spend a fuckton of time between learning characters, writing, speaking, and reading. learning a character language (just be thankful its not chinese) is like learning 2 languages since you have no foundation for character reading/writing

[Necronus]

Just want to add that this Anki flashcard thing rocks. I got the Android version and went to look at public decks and Heisig's Kanji was right there on the top of the list without even seaching. I found someone who made a Heisig hiragana one, but they either changed or shortened many of the stories to their personnal preference I suppose. So I just spent the past few hours here at work changing a few cards every so often and formatted them with italics and bold ... yadda yadda. By the time I was done making all of the cards from memory without the book here, damn this shit sticks fast. I'm recalling every character/syllable, every keyword, and every story really fast after doing that. If anyone wants a copy of mine, I'm going to share it later, but won't for now cause you cant change deck names from the Droid app itself, and I don't wanna look like a dupe of the guy's who I started with.

Either way, thanks to the suggestions of everyone in here. I'm gonna simmer on hiragana for at least a week before starting katakana, then assuming I nail that I'll simmer on both for another week or two before starting Kanji, then I'll try to keep all three in constant flashcard rotation.