All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to Learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency
This blog has influenced me the most :3 I listen to Japanese music and shows as much as possible every day. Most of my Japanese learning is due to just hearing it all the time and picking up on words and looking up words in my dictionary that I keep hearing and don't know.
Rosetta Stone
When I have the time (at least an hour to devote to it) which should be every day, but I'm not always in the mood, I do lessons in Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is the best Japanese language learning software. It's not free, but it works! There's absolutely no English involved, and you can choose whether you would like to read in romaji, kana, or kanji while the speaker goes over the word. Also, there are two different native speakers, a man and a lady, that take turns saying the phrases. At first, I really couldn't understand the man (or any men speaking Japanese) but now it's so natural. I highly recommend this program for anyone interested in learning Japanese quickly with little time put into it.
Fun Japanese Sites for Kids!
I've been looking for activities to do in Japanese on the web for a while, and really, I only find stuff in western languages. I have found a few websites, but I would love it if anyone knew of any interactive flash activities for Japanese!
kids.yahoo.co.jp
Yahoo is amazing ^^ There are tons of kids games with some vocabulary that beginners can catch on to :3 The Japanese is not "dumbed down" for foreign language speakers, but since it's for children, the situations are easy to understand (like "count how many bells there are" etc.)
www.web-japan.org/kidsweb
This is a really cool site! You can even switch to the Japanese language if you are more advanced :3 There are cute activities for children learning Japanese. :3
Software I use:
BYKI-Before you know it (useful Japanese phrases with pronunciation.)
Human Japanese (It's mostly a book with words that can be pronounced. They also have interactive quizes on what you learn)
Tell me more: (it looks like....an old Windows 97 program...but it goes over useful phrases and has many activities you can do to remember what you learn.)
Anki- This is what I use to memorize Kanji. I have about 900 memorized so far, so yes, it's been working great. Focus on the English translation, rather than the Japanese pronunciation and then when you stumble on the words in your reading material, you get an idea as to what the word and you can pronounce it as an example in the sentence :3
Others:
Youtube + Tubesucker = Great music you can listen to on Youtube without streaming it.
I use Tubesucker to download the music from Youtube so that I can listen it to my ipod without streaming it all the time.
Rikaichan-
It's a firefox extension that shows you the pronunciation and definition of japanese words (especially intended for kanji) It also helps when picking the right kanji while typing in Japanese. You hover your mouse over the word and it gives you a better idea of what the word says. Some kanji combinations it doesn't translate (just the two individually) but for most, it recognizes the two or more as a word (including the verbs with hiragana after it) and tells you what tense the verb is in.
Sharedtalk.com - The best free language exchange website ever. It shows all the characters in it's (flash?) based chats. It offers text and voice chats as well as an email thing. There are also chat rooms for particular languages. The Japanese language chatroom almost always has someone in there who can help you. I highly recommend this website to those who have a grasp of the language and want to practice. Romaji is okay there too. You will see hiragana and kanji, but not everyone expects it.
To type in hiragana/kanji:
Get the microsoft IME- it should be in your control panel, go to keyboards and add a keyboard: go to Japanese, and then click Japanese IME. That's all you need.
Now you get a toolbar that gives you the options of english and japanese. Pick japanese and click the input button to switch to hiragana or katakana. Type as you would romaji. When you type hiragana, you press enter when a word (or phrase) is done to keep it in hiragana (it takes a little practice to get the hang of it) and press space to choose your kanji if you want to.
If any of these were posted before, I'm just adding my two cents about them :3
:3 がんばって！ Good luck!