image of the harajuku girl comes straight from zonjineko.com

Repetition works. Avoid writing romaji (transliteralized Japanese) from day one. Focus on pronounciation and annotate words with pitches and accents. Use Japanese when you can and do it with common sense and avoid people who encourage you to speak English instead. Repetition always works. These are but a few language learning tips for Japanese by Eido Inoue who runs his wonderful blog Nippon: until Death us do part. If you’ve learned a few languages in your life or at least tried to with a strong but fading amount of dedication, you’ll see the truth behind that: learning languages is actually arduous work, however gratifying and you’ll need a few extra steps with Japanese (would need to take extra steps with any Asian language, I had my fair share of battle with Tibetan and Mongolian). If you don’t want to go and live in Japan, these same rules apply just as much. Oh. And the basic rule that actually worked quite well with me all these years: if you really want to learn a language and feel like you’ve progressed a lot: two hours of learning each and every day is a must. More like three, if you can afford that. Watch movies. Real ones, not anime flics – those are just as good to get to the pronounciation right but you’ll confuse everyone with the slang you’ve learned (or just memorized, for that matter). Write your kanji a lot, otherwise they’ll just slip past your brains. Get a teacher, a tough one. You won’t actually get anywhere with a nice person who’ll forgive you your missed classes, unfinished homeworks and stuff without a slap on the wrist. If you wanna be fast and efficient and bulldog about it, do it like you mean it. Hah, sorry, got carried away. Read that article, that’s amazing. (Below, that’s Hiroko teaching you a few things about job hunting and alike.)