CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Hi! Does anyone have any suggestions of some good text books or software that I can use to teach myself Japanese? I'd really appreciate any help y'all can give. Thanks a million.

I use Berlitz's Essential Japanese. Quite satisfying. Comes with dialogue, structure/grammar usage, exercises, and sectional reviews. It uses romanji to teach you, though, so it's meant to teach you how to speak the language, not exactly to write it in the traditional way.

I have a Yookoso textbook, but I really can't say if it's good or not, and I really have nothing to compare it to.

I used Barron's Japanese The Easy Way and the Pimsleur eight CD audio set myself. Once you know some basic Japanese, the Manga-Jin Basic Japanese Through Comics series is an excellent next step. Yes, it teaches you Japanese grammar, vocabulary, kanji and even/especially culture using scenarios from manga! The series is a little dated (the most recent manga it references is Ranma 1/2), but it's really, really good.

I just have the Yookoso book lying around in wait for when I need to start taking the class in Fall...I'm sometimes just too lazy to read. The audio CDs are somewhat nice to have, problem is if you don't have the book in hand there is no English voice-over to compliment the Japanese counterpart, which is what I really hoped for. It's good I suppose, I mean right around the mid-section, Romanization is gone and replaced heavily by pure Hiragana, Katakan and Kanji.

If you have a Japanese bookstore in your area, they should have a good variety of language learning books to choose from. Honestly, the way I practice my Japanese is listening to plenty of Japanese music, practicing reading Japanese in some manga and some shoujo magazines I have (once you nail hiragana and katakana...and possibly some kanji, you'll most likely be able to do this), watch Japanese drama and music shows on tv, and talk to my mom and grandma (they speak fluent). We also have a few Japanese dictionaries in our house, so that helps as well. This method is really just my own way when I'm not able to go to school for it, so I don't really recommend it to anyone ^^' Sorry, I just thought I would share it with you... lol