I've just gotten my hands on Rosetta Stone for Japanese, and although it's not the best program (they leave you in the air with a lot of the vocab and particles) it's given me some sort of a jumpstart to continue scouring the web for more help on this. Although I'm worse then a newbie I've love to see if anyone here can help me and others out with this... I could post some good websites I've found along with how to... aquire Rosetta Stone for yourselves to? Questions? Comments? Opinions?
Japanese is a fascinating language. Unfortunately I've forgotten most of what I taught myself (which wasn't much). Learning Kanji and vocabulary was what put me off, in the end. I have little patience for memorization, but love grammar (Japanese's in particular). Go figure. A good book, which I learned a lot from, is called Japanese the Manga Way. It doesn't focus a whole lot on vocabulary, but it's great for learning grammar. It uses examples from simple comic strips (actual published comics) to illustrate the principles.