Duolingo or something similar? Classes with actual people if you can stomach that?

A flashcard software was what enabled me at the start. I tried AnkiSRS and just learned a bunch of words/kana/kanji. It gets very inefficient to just use flashcards after a while, but software like Anki keeps you on a daily workflow. Ankiweb has ready made decks, and as Japanese is extremely popular, you should be able to find good quality decks.

Oh, I forgot - TV quiz shows. They often read out the question and it’s shown on screen at the same time, so one thing supports the other.

I also learned German partly by watching Star Trek (I knew roughly what the characters said in English and found I could piece it together in German). Whether some of the terms were useful in day to day life is another matter…

You didn’t specify which language, but since this is the community for Japanese Immersion, I am basing my answer under the assumption that the language you’d like to learn is Japanese.

First, you would need to get some basics under your belt. I’m talking kanji, grammar, listening and reading comprehension, etc. Apps/webpages like Duolingo are okay, but honestly, nothing beats having an actual teacher. Everybody is going to suck at something and a teacher can advise you how to get better in the areas that are giving you problems. So yeah, if you have an option to take a class in your local school or whatever, I would go for that.

After that, just dive into something. Read a manga, watch an anime without subtitles, play a JRPG in its native language, etc. Fair warning, though: it’s going to feel like a lot of effort at first, you probably won’t understand half the things the characters are saying and that’s completely normal. It does get easier with practice.

If you’re into Zelda, you might want to check out the Japanese versions of Phantom Hourglass (夢幻の砂時計) and Spirit Tracks (大地の汽笛), both on the Nintendo DS. It’s a game meant for all ages, so no complicated grammar and you can tap on kanji characters you’re not familiar with and the game will show you the pronounciation like so.

The Japanese version of A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS (神々のトライフォース2) goes a step further and gives you the pronounciation above all or most kanji characters (picture), so no tapping involved.

Good luck!

Duolingo is a catch-all for many different languages, but the didactics are rather meh. There are dedicated sites for different languages, less well-known than Duolingo & therefore harder to find. For Japanese, there’s wanikani.com for example. I’d suggest joining a community for learning one specific language and ask what learning tools & materials the others use.

It also depends on what type of learner you are + your level of motivation/your goals: Do you want to achieve fluency or are you already content with just a passive understanding, do you want oral AND written command of a language, etc.

What language? It’s quite different to learn a Sinitic language than to learn an Arabic one, or a Germanic one. I have some experience with Italian, German and Japanese (also Spanish and English but that doesn’t count) so I can give you an insight on that, but it’s not always the same process.

If you are not sure yet if the language is for you, I would try to get a feel for it with Duolingo. It seems to be the best free app.

If you are confident that you want to learn the language, and you have some money to spend, then I have some more recommendations:

Pimsleur (The most expensive course I have tried (around $500 for the whole course, or as subscription for ~$23 per month).

I quite like this course because you see how you get better every day. Also, over time, the lessons speed up, so you end up learning to speak at a normal conversational speed.

• full course consists of five levels of 30 lessons each
• 30 minute audio-lessons
• You repeat the lessons until you can do at least 80% correctly, then move on to the next lesson
• in the lesson, an English narrator and multiple native speakers explain the language to you. There are always pauses for you to repeat the sentences. Later on, the lessons start to pick up speed and will increasingly resemble actual conversations.
• The goal is to learn speaking intuitively without explicitly learning vocabulary, or grammar rules
• focus on speaking the language, correct pronunciation
• some reading lessons, but the focus is definitely on learning how to speak

LingoDeer ($160 for the lifetime license, or as a subscription for $15 per month)

I found this course to be very well-structured.

• good for Asian languages in general
• actual audio recordings for all vocabulary and sentences (in contrast: Duolingo still uses computer-generated speech for the Japanese course)
• grammar lessons with minigames
• vocabulary is always learned as part of sentences, and you can always click on the sentences to hear how they are pronounced
• there is a practice corner where you can review what you previously learned
• listening comprehension lessons are integrated in the course

Book: Remembering the Kanji (James W. Heisig)

I use this book to learn the Kanji because I had trouble remembering them just by using learning apps. As a free alternative, you may also want to take a look at KanjiDamage.

• You learn the “components” from with the Kanji are built
• book provides a lot of guidance on how to create good memotics
• Kanji are ordered, so you always know all the bits and pieces of a Kanji, before you learn the Kanji itself → because of this, you don’t learn them ordered by usefulness and some pretty important Kanji pretty far towards the end
• I think there are also translated versions of the book in some other languages.

I have also tried out multiple other Apps and courses, including Renshuu and Jalup, but none of these quite worked for me.

Of course, I would also try to watch as much Japanese TV and videos as possible, play Japanese games and listen to Japanese music. Just so your brain is constantly confronted with the new language. You will pick up lots of phrases and get a good feel for the language without much effort.

(My response is not Japanese related) A lot of people here are recommending Duolingo. I, personally, find it to be awful for anything past the basics (progress is so much slower than it could be). It also often rushes the beginning of different language courses, especially when dealing with unfamiliar writing systems, and the written help often ignores pronunciation or deals with it poorly, with what could be described as an aversion to the use of the IPA.

I don’t have any recommendations and find that services dedicated to the language itself often are good enough (like lernu.net for Esperanto). Real life tutoring coupled with the reading of a book on the language, I predict will very likely be much better.

Lots of reading and listening. However, the key here is comprehensible input (you can look up that term). You need to learn some amount of vocabulary for any input to make sense. So either start with very easy texts and a dictionary or start with Duolingo or something like 200 most common words flashcards. Lingq might be a good service too if you can afford it.

You might be interested in this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9ND6uw6-QA&ab_channel=MattvsJapan

You don’t need to learn it anymore…
https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ja/You don’t need to learn it anymore…