First a little background. Before I came to JET, I had a decent grasp of the Hiragana and basic phrases thanks to Pimsleur. For the first 2 months, I tried learning kanji through the Heisig method using the book Remembering the Kanji. And I got about 500 kanji into it before I went back and realized that I wasn't retaining any of the kanji. Basically from August to December I had very little to show as far as Japanese progress and I was pretty disappointed in myself so I started taking studying seriously in mid December and I can tell a huge difference between then and now (mid February). In December I knew about 200 kanji really well and couldn't understand a thing on TV. Now I can recognize 2042 kanji and understand some of the questions that they ask on those awesome Japanese game shows.
So heres the summary of how I am going about reaching my goal of JLPT level 2 (The second highest level possible, level 2 is fluent as far as I'm concerned).
First, by far the most important thing, you have to really really want to learn Japanese. If you are forcing yourself to study and not enjoying it, then you're pretty much doomed. You have to make time in your schedule to study often and make it productive.
Second, download Anki (which means "memorization" in Japanese), a free online flash card program that is the greatest thing ever invented for learning Japanese. The rest comes down to finding decks that you enjoy. For me, it was the deck, Heisig's Remember the Kanji 1-3 w/top 2 community stories. That deck gives you stories for each kanji and makes them very easy to remember. Don't expect it to magically do all the work for you though, it took me about 6 hours a day for 20 days to memorize them all. So you're going to have to set aside around 120 hours of solid study just to get the kanji learned.
Third, my current step, is to translate 10,000 sentences. When you translate sentences, you learn the vocab in context as well as kanji compounds and obviously grammar structures all at the same time.
But of course it gets a little bland to just sit around translating sentences I'm also doing other things. Probably the coolest of which is I downloaded a couple of movie Anki decks that show you a picture/video from a movie, plays an audio clip, and shows the Japanese characters on one side, then on the other is the English translation. This is super awesome. Already after just a week I can already understand about the first 30 minutes of Spirited Away and it is one of the coolest things in the world to watch something and hear "blah blah blah" then an hour later watch a couple scenes and follow all of the dialog.
On top of that, I'm working on recognizing kanji (I'm decent at going from English to kanji but I am terrible at the reverse.) So I have an anki deck that just shows a kanji then the other side has the English key word.
Finally, I also use Rosetta Stone but I find it to be far too boring. When I get really sick of studying, I throw on the TV and watch awesome Japanese game shows or anime.
Well hope this helps someone out there. I will finish with a picture from AJATT that explains everything pretty clearly.
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