MidgarKonotsu wrote...
Raze wrote...
Anime, Manga, Visual Novels, and any other sort of weaboo method to learn WILL NOT WORK unless you already have a decent vocabulary as well as a VERY SOLID UNDERSTANDING of how the language works (grammar, sentence structure). I CANNOT STRESS THIS POINT ENOUGH, and this is where 99% of the fanboys fail. You become the sort of person that Dante1214 outlined above: annoying weaboos who feel a strong urge to show off their broken Japanese knowledge at every possible opportunity.
tl:dr - Best way to learn Japanese without moving to Japan for a few years? Take classes, pay attention, work hard, and get a solid understanding of the language first. THEN you can go do all your anime/manga.
This post is win.
It's win because it's true. I've learnt my Japanese through watching anime and occasional forum browsing - where does this leave me? With broken Japanese: half-assed grammatically wrong sentences, unable to read, unable to write, and very hard to communicate with others. It's probably my own ability to understand some of the spoken language and it's relation to Mandarin was I actually to communicate with my Japanese cousins in an intelligible form, whom I have no doubt cringed at my excellent wielding of the Japanese langauge.
Currently my cousin from Taiwan is over in the U.S. to learn English. And like Raze said, it's best to learn a language through classes, good teachers, and constant devotion to studying and practicing. Living in an environment based on the language is good, but more often than not that fails - my cousin hangs out with people who speak Mandarin. Where's the point now?