Which should I learn first?
 

Hey all, I am currently dedicating about 5 hours a day to learning Japanese and I would like to know what is the most effective way in learning the language. I am currently doing these things

Reading Text of Japan itself
Watching japanese TV shows, Not anime
ROsetta stone
Pimsleurs

So its all visual and audio that I am doing

Now I am concerned because I wont be learnign hiragana and katakana and kanji, So would it be wise to continue my method of study but not know how to write a single sentence in Japanese?

What you are doing at the moment is fine, but i would say at least learn all of the kana and read through a decent grammar book just to get to grips with basic structures etc.

If you are like me and would just prefer a free source of grammar information there is also this site Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar which i would definatly recommend reading through.

You will at some point definatly need to learn kanji, theres no way around it, but i didn't start learning it until i had learned kana and was a few weeks into grammar.

As for if what your doing is effective, well are you having fun and not getting bored?
If your not boring yourself to death by your methods then it's probably going to be effective for you and you should just stick to it and see what happens, thats the only way you will really know.

Before I learned how to speak any Japanese I learned how to write hiragana and katakana. The first day of class my teacher wrote all the vowels on the board in hiragana and told us to memorize them. The next day he wrote the k's. He did this everyday. He would give us little tricks to remembering them (numonic devices right? ... definitly not sure how to spell that). Everyday for homework we would have to write out the alphabet as far as we knew it ten times. After we learned all the hiragana, we learned katakana the same way.

Hiragana and katakana look intimidating, but they are very similiar and not to difficult to remember after a while. You study 5 hours a day? That's impressive! Even if you just take a few minutes each day to do some exercise like this, I'm sure you will find it easy. Even if you don't know kanji, at least you will have some basic idea of how to read and write in Japanese. And the internet is a magical resource! There are plenty of hiragana and katakana charts that you can print out from Google.

... Hope this helps some!

ROsetta stone?

CBA google.. whats this?

What, you've never heard of Rosetta Stone? It's a language learning software.

Thanks so much everyone for your input, you know what I am going to do? Print Hirigana and katikana list and print each section on my laptop... So I can look down and see it ^_^, I dont know if you understand what I'm saying but maybe I will take a picture of it later.

Is it good? I mean, is it worth getting?

It's worth getting the torrent and downloading it... The software being 200 for 5 CD's is not worth it

Do you know where I could get the torrent?

Whats helped me in learning Japanese is to first learn the basic (well in my case relearn them) word and sentence formations and then watch alot of Japanese TV and anime without sub titles then try and put it together.

I'm amazed at how much I've truly forgotten!