So.......I want to learn Japanese.

Yes you see before you another nerd hoping to learn japanese so he can show off, translate porn, watch anime.

Well not really.

The thing is, now that football is over with I am left with a considerable amount of time on my hands. An extra 4 hours a day to be precise.

I bought a book "Japanese for Dummys" (classic, I know)and read through it.

I get some of the basics now. Titles, sentence structures, stressed vowels, high pitch voice, a few words, traditions few more things. Not even done with that book yet.

So now I'm just wondering.

What next? Should I pull out a vocabulary book and start memorizing words?

Should I start learn the japanese alphabet?

And, I really think I could do this. When I'm intrested in omething I'm known to go all out. I decided one day I wanted to build a computer when I was 10 years old. I read up a bit and built it. Now I'm on my way to A+ certification. I could tell you the name of every part in that box. When I was in high school football as a sophmore I had never played football before and I didn't even know what a tackle was. I put my mind to it and I wound up starting that year being the only sophmore on the team. I'm just saying, I'm pretty determined when I want to be and I bet I could do this.

Well, I would say you can try the "Japanese Alphabet." But don't get too comfortable--this means memorizing the Hiragana and Katakana tables, as well as the Joyo-Kanji list.

Yeah, I agree with Noutakun. Before even thinking of going on to vocabulary books, learn the Japanese 'alphabets' which are Hiragana and Katakana. At least learn those two (there's only 46 of each its easier than it looks) so you can easily read them when given to you. Trust me, learning vocabulary using hiragana and katakana is much better than with English (and going ahead and learning the Kanji (Chinese characters, there's like 2000 you're expected to know but you can get the basics down with 200 or so) is one step further than that).

However, I say just go for the katakana and hiragana. Learn those, then learn to pronounce vocabulary words using those rather than english letters/romaji. Don't even look at the romaji, from what I've heard it can damage your learning if you try to learn to read or write later.

Thats actually a great idea with the furigana dictionary. Never thought of using furigana that way, thx.

then after you learn and memorize the vocab, you should get started on the grammar, which is undoubtedly the hardest thing to learn, as the Japanese language has many things that English won't have.