Any good Japanese learning software?

[Vypyrz]

Kanji- These are the more elaborate characters. Many were initially adopted from China. With Kanji, One character can often represent an entire thought, idea or oe subject. There are over 300 different Kanji characters and most people don't know them all, and use only a few common ones.

Hiragana- This is the basic Japanese alphabet. It contains 110 characters. Each character represents a different phonetic sound. They are used to spell words in everyday life.

Katakana- Katakana are abbreviated forms of the Hiragana. They are used when writing a foreign word, or a word that has been adopted into the Japanese Language.

Romaji- This is nothing more than the Japanese term for the Western or "Roman" alphabet, and when Japanese words are spelled using our alphabet. It is what you are reading now.

I spent 9 years living in Japan. The best way to learn on your own is to get a book or chart with the Hiragana in it. You will find that there are a few basic Hiragana, and that each subsequent group is repesented by one of the basic Hiragana with a slight modification. I used 3' X 5" index cards. I wrote the character on one side and the phonetic pronunciation on the back. I would look at the character, say the pronunciation, and flip the card over to see if I was right. Or, I would look at the pronunciation, write the character, and flip the card over to see if I was right. Once you learn the Hiragana and Katakana, get a book on sentence structure. It's not too hard. Japanese sentence structure is about the same as most European and Latin based languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and French. At that point, it is just a matter of getting a dictionary and learning the vocabulary of what you want to say.

For Conversational Japanese, another person who speaks it will help greatly. Check around for anyone who would be willing to tutor, or just converse with you. You can probably find someone local or online. While I was living there, I met a Japanese guy who taught English to Japanese students at a night school. I volunteered to go in and talk with his students to help them with their conversational English, and the payoff was, they helped me improve my conversational Japanese...