How to teach yourself Japanese

Everyone I talk to about what I've done over the last four years and plan to do soon asks me some seemingly pre-prepared questions. And one of them is always "How did you teach yourself Japanese?" This post will not stop people asking me that but it might help others who want to give it a go.

The first six months I spent teaching myself I devoted to learning the two Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Here's a good page you could print out and use, although I didn't use this one, I can't find those any more.

The Japanese written language consists of the hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji alphabets.
Hiragana - phonetic syllables used to write Japanese words e.g. さようなら
Katakana - phonetic syllables used to write non-Japanese words e.g. チョコレート
Kanji - Chinese symbols used in Japanese to represent words or ideas e.g. 愛
Romaji - Japanese words expressed using the Roman alphabet e.g. Konnichiwa

Katakana is the alphabet I taught myself first because it seemed to be the simplest. At the time, I wasn't convinced that I could actually achieve what I set out to do so I just tried my best.
I learned each one five at a time. I started with the vowels.
I would recommend using a whiteboard to save paper. Thankfully, my brother Dominic had been given a whiteboard for his birthday so I stole that (it's actually still in my bedroom, I should probably give it back). But failing a whiteboard, paper will do the job.
I used the time-honoured tradition of look-cover-write-check-ing and yes, dull and repetitive at times, but it does work.
And you feel real good when you can jumble each lot of five up and write them without difficulty.
Test yourself all the time, have some spare time? Write them on your leg with a finger. Draw them in the air. Anything to get them into your brain. And, of course, if you ever find yourself confronted by Japanese text - read as many characters as you can! It feels great, even if you have no idea what you're reading.

Hiragana came next. With a thorough grounding in katakana I felt I was ready to advance to the next level. I was worried that the new characters would override the old ones so I constantly referred back to katakana after studying hiragana.
It was difficult to separate the two alphabets in my mind, but in general, katakana is straighter than the curlier hiragana. Katakana just looks simpler.

After that six months of looking, re-looking, covering, re-covering, writing, re-writing, checking and re-checking the two alphabets, which add up to 142 characters together, 71 in each, I finally felt ready to move onto speaking.

I would definitely recommend Random House's Living Language Japanese Beginners' course. Although others may work better for other people, that's the only course I have used, so mine is by no means the final word on the subject. Please let me know your thoughts and recommendations if you have any.
The pack includes a coursebook, a English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary and CDs to accompany the coursebook. This course is meant to last you six weeks and give you a thorough understanding of basic conversational Japanese. And it has certainly done that for me. However, it took me a whole year to work myself through its 40 lessons as I was also doing my GCSEs. I wanted to really understand everything in every lesson, but now I've finished it I realise that that wasn't necessary. They really mean that once you have a good understanding of the lesson and can get 100% on the quiz then you should move on. Everything wrapped up nicely at the end, I went through the entire course not understanding a certain tense formation (I can't remember what) and kept finding examples of it in lessons but it didn't explain it. Then I found it, in Lesson 40. So don't take it too seriously.
Any chance you get to speak/ listen to Japanese, take it!!! The downside of teaching yourself is that you don't have anyone to speak to on a regular basis as you would on a course or at school, or indeed, in Japan. So when I was offered the chance to take a group of Japanese tourists around Cadbury World and Bournville village in South Birmingham, I jumped on it. I was terrified as I had never spoken to real Japanese people in the flesh before. But it all went well. Some of my rehearsed sentences and phrases didn't come out quite right, but they were very understanding.

After I finished the Beginners' course, I asked my parents for the Advanced course. It seems to be very business-orientated, based around a fictional character's experiences moving to Japan for work. But it is still very useful in expanding and building upon existing Japanese knowledge. Do not get the Advanced course without first having a base in Japanese language!! You will be put off for life!

Then came the kanji, the Chinese characters. There are 1,945 kanji commonly used in Japanese writing. To read a Japanese newspaper (shinbun) you need to be able to read all of these apparently. I currently know about 150 kanji and I hope that this number will increase significantly once I actually get to Japan. Sentences in Japanese are written using a combination of hiragana, katakana and kanji so you can't understand sentences without knowing all these alphabets. Frustrating!! But it keeps you working.
At first I just printed some kanji off the Internet and tried learning them parrot fashion. This worked up to a point, particularly for the simpler ones but eventually it became very difficult to retain them all. So I looked it up on the Internet and found a book.
'Remembering the Kanji: Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters' by James Heisig.
And it does what it says on the tin. It teaches you how to remember each kanji using a story. Just remember the story and the rest will flow. More information here.
All of these things really helped me. So much that I actually felt prepared to do GCSE Japanese in June 2007. I was scared about doing them, and they were a bit challenging at times but it all came good in the end. I got an A*! I was more pleased with that result than my A-levels! But maybe it is not surprising that my top grade was in the writing paper.

So if you want to do it, and feel that you can work at it, then do it!! Teach yourself Japanese!! It's really worth it.