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This website allows you to read an entire Holt, Rhineheart, and Winston textbook online if you already have a keyword from a textbook you buy online. If you're into foreign languages, it has French, German, and Spanish, and aside from that,

These sites teach you basic Japanese if you study enough.

Parents just have to watch to make sure their children aren't looking at porn instead of studying and help them along.

I'm in about my 3rd month of doing exactly what it sounds like you want to do -- teaching myself Japanese. On the whole, I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. The key thing is, do you enjoy learning? If so, then it should be worthwhile to try.

There are a couple of resources I am using to learn:

Japanese in Mangaland - a fantastic book that is organized into simple lessons of grammar, culture, and vocabulary. Each lesson includes examples of actual Manga to apply what you have learned. (There are two more books in the series once you get past the first one.)

If you read that book and decide you want to learn more, then it's time to start learning Kanji (you should already have learned the two phonetic scripts -- Hiragana and Katakana by then). For Kanji, I have been very pleased with:

Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Henshall.

This book may or may not work for you depending on your learning style, but it's been fantastic for me (I'm up to 400 Kanji in 3 months). It basically lays out the history of each Kanji and explains why it came to have it's current meaning. It shows you how to break the characters down into their component parts (called radicals) and what the meaning of those parts is. Since radicals can be shared by many kanji, this gives you extra insight into what a Kanji is likely to mean, even if you don't know it to begin with. This is a great memory aid, since it means you're not just memorizing random symbols but actually learning a system of symbols with meaning and context.

The other tool I used to learn Kanji is King Kanji. This is a Palm program that has tons of different writing lessons. It does handwriting recognition and tells you when you are writing the characters incorrectly. You can use it to quiz either the kanji, katakana, hiragana, or the meanings or pronunciation of the Kanji. I basically do this whenever I have some down time (bathroom, bus, etc.) and that is what has allowed me to progress as far as I have on my own with learning the Japanese writing.

Finally, a couple of websites that I have found helpful:

Teach yourself Japanese has a great detailed explanation of Japanese grammar.
Japanese Online has fantastic language lessons.

There are a ton of other sites out there as well. Just spend some time with Google and I'm sure you'll find the ones that work for you.

Good luck! Learning Japanese has been a lot of fun for me, and isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

I learn't basic Japanese with this site. Enough to start reading online dictionaries and forums. Combined with countless hours of anime... ;-) I'm about ready for my trip to Japan next year to see how it all paid off.

In conclusion, there's more than a few references for any language online, learn the basics, then start from the ground up in "Real Life"(tm). Like a kid that's learning his first tongue. Only other advice I can give is to learn the language on its own, use the basics of the language as a catapult to learn the rest with sites that use that actual language and if you don't know the meaning, use a dictionary (don't translate, just define). If you try to learn a language by becoming a walking babel-fish... you'll sound like it when having a conversation. And that ain't a good thing. You get the whole immigrant accent going on. My parents have that... :-\

Other posters have addressed the many problems with your post adequately, so I'll not re-tread the same ground.. however, you might find this pagean eye-opener

Give it a try - That is a test given to japanese 12 year olds, and the full thing consists of 225 such questions. Time limits are given on the questions (more are max 2 minutes), and you're not allowed a calculator. Still feel so superior?

This is a good place to start. japanese-online

That language instruction link seems really freakin' cool! I've toyed with the idea of learning Japanese for a while now. Maybe I'll finally find the motivation to try it out with this.

I've recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who runs a tech staffing agency about foreign language study amongst computer programmers. Both programming and foregin languages have always been an interest of mine. I was surprised to hear from him that this is actually "not unusual at all", and that in his mind the two interests have always gone hand in hand. I was wondering if anyone else here might have noticed this correlation?

Mozilla doesn't inherently have a Japanese language pack, like MSIE. Instead, you have to install Japanese language support in Control Panel|Regional Options (at least that's where it is on Win2K) and insert your Windows disc. Mozilla will then use the OS support to display foriegn characters. I have installed it to be able to access the later lessons here where they use kana instead of romanji.

On what level did you want to Learn Japanese.

Note that this was just the first link on a "learn japanese" google search. I know of a few other free resourses, mostly for Palm that help in this endevour as well.