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In an inexact analogy, Kanji is an assembly language system with thousands of opcodes (~50,000); it's added to your tool-belt as you master the other 2 short alphabets.

The alphabets lacking Kanji are only about 50 symbols each. By the time you hit first grade and Kanjis begin to be instructed (at a pace of ONLY a few per year,) kids have already mastered these basic 100 symbols.

While it is true that Anime is as big a time sink as watching hour-long live action on Hulu, you can benefit from children's anime (like Fairy Tail and Mahoujin Guru Guru) and blind rerunning where you try to make out words and grammar patterns without relying on the subtitles. Speech in kid's shows is always clearer, and written signs have plenty of non-kanji writings.

You can look for an American language learning show called "Let's Learn Japanese" (Public television) on Youtube, try flashcards Anki (PC flashcard system) and play Slime Forest for fun recall speed of Kana and Kanjis.

Eventually you'll find too many vectors to tackle, from college grammar books (pick one with plenty of Hiragana learning on it), a small physical dictionaries, western alphabet-based translators offline or online.

At some point of your trying vectors in parallel and listening to the language, many symbols and expressions start to show patterns and meanings beyond "it's too complicated to explain this untranslatable greeting in chapter 1 but essential to expose you to it." Have fun!

This site is pretty well done for learning a language (Esperanto in this case): http://en.lernu.net/ For Japanese, there's this game: http://lrnj.com/ Haven't tried it, but I like the idea. :)

There is also Project LRNJ, an RPG game that teaches you JAPANESE.
It is not browser-based, but it is available for every major OS.

Get it here!

And good luck getting rid of all those slimes!

Maybe I missed it, but I can't believe nobody mentioned LRNJ. It's a role playing game that teaches you Japanese characters and words. It's also cross platform so it runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. In just a few days it helped me learn katakana, hirigana, and the meaning of about 500 or so kanji symbols. I highly recommend it.

I am doing the same thing although I will likely eventually take classes as I would like to be able to put this on a resume. Heres one interesting approach to learning the alphabets and even some simple words. http://lrnj.com/ Its a retro style adventure game (think Final Fantasy) that trys to teach you the japanese alphabet's along the way.

I found this: http://lrnj.com/ to be a fun way to help me learn the characters (although probably writing them repeatedly is the best for drilling them into your brain)

You're talking about Slime Forest Adventure. I tried it, but it's frustratingly hard.

Also he's a warmonger wingnut! That is all.

I was quite surprised when I first got my lappy and gave the battery a test drive. It actually lasted longer than advertised and that was plugging away in word, playing slime forest adventure http://lrnj.com/ and turning on the wireless occasionally to look things up. So whats the trick? One of the high contrast colour schemes that comes with windows. Most of the power draining white space in Word, and all menu bars are turned to black. Also the high contrast setting allows turning down the backlight power while still being able to see. Seems to work quite well.

There is a game in old style RPG out there which will teach you to read japanese. It's actually very effective.

Slimeforest: http://lrnj.com/

Oh and it's free while in developement.

I've used moodle - I'm a first year CS student, and my school uses it. It's tolerably nice as an end user, but the teaching assistants complain about not being able to change due dates or maximum grades on it, etc.

A fun little game for learning japanese is http://lrnj.com/lrnj - check it out. I rather like it.

You should give Slime Forest Adventure a try. http://www.lrnj.com/ It's like an old Final Fantasy for the Nintendo, but designed to teach English-speaking gamers written Japanese. All the kana (including even 'we' and 'wi') can be learned within a few days, and it has a little over a thousand kanji, with a short description to help memorization for each one. Currently it just has the English meaning for each kanji, pronounciation is on the way. There's Linux and Windows versions, Mac OS/X only sorta works.

The project's currently stalled while multi-kanji words are properly included, but as-is it should give anyone able to deal with a demanding game a huge head start on reading Japanese.

You could try simple games like Slime Forest. Students who use it should probably know their Hiragana and Katakana first, though.

Some form of Jeopardy is also always a good learning format for me. And use candy for prizes because they have too much and it needs to be disposed of. Ganbatte kudasai.

-Anonimasu Kawaadu

So far I've seen mostly comments about poverty. First I'll sumarize what i've seen commented so far about educational games themselves.

First, someone posted the link to http://lrnj.com/, which is a 2D role playing game, for learning japanese. I've tried this game. This game is a good idea. Unfortunately, the game started out too hard for it to be any fun (for me), since I know nothing about japanese yet, and really had no interest untill i got the game. If you have enought interest in japanese that you know a little bit of it already, i'm sure it's great.

Next, someone posted http://www.game-research.com/art_myths_of_gaming.a sp , which is a article basically saying that that educational aren't educational and aren't any fun. I see a few reasons for this.

#1 there have only been a few educational games made. If I was to take a small random sampling of all games (not just popular games, all games), I bet they would probably suck too. What's the odds of picking doom3 out of a list of thousands of games?

#2 People who make "educational" games, often will have other agendas that may interefere with the fun of the game. For example, people who have the desire for "games to be educational", are often the same people who will wish that "games were non-violent". Obviously a game could become bad quick by mixing agendas. Also, their other agenda may take priority over the educational content of the game. In other words, it's not educational games people have problems with, it's the people who are the type to make them, which people have problems with.

#3 High risk games, don't get large budgets. When have you seen a educational game with grpahics that competed with quake3 (or whatever was currently popular at the time of it's release)? never? That's because the majority of the work spent on a game is in the graphics/artwork...

hmm. I've talked long enough. Maybe I'll stop here. The short version is:

We need cheaper ways of aquiring good artwork.

Maybe I'll write this out more and post it as a article.

The topic of learning through the means of video games, can't go without a reference to Project LRNJ.

This game helps you to learn Japanese. It's just so much fun learning this way! For those interested, here is the website:
http://lrnj.com/

This is a nice little game that may help you learn your katakana and hiragana.
Also, some people put sticky labels with the foreign words on their stuff. And it may sound "babyish" but flash cards are pretty useful for learning Kanji. J-List sells sets of flash cards, and loads of other Japanese goodies too :o)

I've been trying to learn Japanese for a while now, but I haven't had much time to, what with final year of uni.

Slime Forest Adventure will help. It wont teach you everything, but it's a good/fun/free way to learn some japanese.

Slime Forest is a fun, simple NES-style RPG that teaches kana (the alphabet) and 200 of the most important kanji.

It's LGPL, too!

So Zeus is the god of Hubris?

Also, check out LRNJ, a shareware RPG designed to teach Japanese while you play it. Entertaining *and* educational!

Note: There is no n in roumaji! Lots of confused students write it, "romanji."
Please kick anyone you catch doing that.
"Romaji" is the most conventional English spelling, and the one you should probably use, but I use "roumaji" here as
the accurate phonetic spelling in the roumaji style I use for Project LRNJ.

There's a project in the works intending to teach (written) Japanese from scratch through a CRPG vehicle.

I hope the owner manages to finish it... After completing the game, people could then progress to those Japanese CRPGs that were never translated!

This perhaps becomes viable because of the volume of other Japanese-language games in the market... I'm not sure how well this general technique might apply to other languages, however.

I'm like that, too. It bothers me enough when I catch myself losing time like that, but when I started making games, and saw users get hooked doing something they probably don't really enjoy, I just felt awful.

It's kind of a life goal for me to find ways of turning that sort of impulse to productive ends, such as with my current project.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people playing games and having fun, but I like the idea of taking the guilt factor completely out of it.

That's funny. I'm working on something that's right along those lines:an RPG that teaches you Japanese. (please excuse the sig redundancy... not everyone sees sigs)