Ultimately, the only reason you should try to learn Japanese is because you want to. That is to say that you have to want to learn Japanese, which is not the same as simply wanting to be able to speak or read it.
In particular, I warn anyone planning to learn Japanese solely to understand untranslated anime and manga. I don’t mean that it’s a bad thing to want to do, but bear in mind that it’ll take you years of study before you know enough to actually translate anything. Best to get something else to motivate you in the meantime.
Learning a language to any reasonable degree of fluency will take a lot of time and effort. You need some motivation to put in that time and effort or it’s not going to happen.
There are lots of reasons to want to learn Japanese, from the promise of a job being harassed by foreign schoolchildren to simply liking the sound of the language. They can be as trivial and silly as you like; the important thing is that they encourage you to study.
Once you’ve found yourself some motivation, you’ll need to know what you should study first. You’ll almost certainly want to concentrate on the spoken language at first, because it’s considerably easier, and far less intimidating. Spoken languages are generally easier; you, and pretty much everyone else in the world, learnt to speak before they learnt to write (if they learnt the latter at all). Not only that, but the Japanese writing system in particular looks very scary. They have two sets of around fifty phoenetic characters, plus thousands of kanji (Chinese ideographic characters).
That said, it isn’t a good idea to ignore writing entirely. Whilst you can learn Japanese without the writing, using the latin alphabet to write Japanese sounds (romaji), experts seem to agree that this isn’t a terribly good idea. You can tell from the way the Japanese say English words that their pronunciation is rather different from ours. Learning the Japanese phoenetic “alphabets” (technically syllabaries) should help you pronounce words more accurately.
So if you’re going to learn to speak and listen, you’ll need some Japanese to listen to. What about anime? While this is a good idea in theory, it doesn’t hold up in practice. Anime tends to be packed with strange accents and dialoge which, whilst they are Japanese, aren’t really what you want to be learning. Besides, they generally go to fast for you to actually learn anything, so the best you’re likely to achieve is a collection of odd words and phrases, but no real language.
The university language centre offers evening Japanese courses at various levels, with discounted prices for students. Trouble is you have to sign up at the start of the year (Wednesday of week 1), otherwise you’re not going to get a place. They are, however, very useful. They also run some courses for accademic credit (CATS points). These are free, and move at a faster pace.
As stated above, the desire to understand untranslated anime & manga is not a good goal when learning a language, but that doesn’t mean it’s not beneficial. RobM outlines his experiences.
I started Japanese lessons because I thought it’d be cool - a 2-year stint of anime addiction had me at a point where I could understand many common phrases. I’d sometimes feel smug when I noticed a non-literal translation.I enrolled on the Warwick leisure course and made the mistake of getting the Kana textbook (which was written entirely in Kana, so I had to look up each phonograph in the back before I could pronounce it’s syllable). Because of this I learnt to read Hirigana (and to a certain extent Katakana) quite quickly - the two phonetic character-sets - which is great for impressing friends.Ultimately the leisure course taught me a lot of the grammer and general form of the language, and this did help me understand more of my beloved anime, but not as much as you’d think. For instance I’d recognise questions in dialog by a trailing “ka”, which is effectivly like reading out a “?” in English.I did not continue the course, and now - a year later - the only things I remember are how to count to about 10,000 and that the Japanese don’t have any swear words, or really anyway of being rude to each other, except to be sarcastically polite.So my advice is to seriously consider your reasons for wanting to learn Japanese, and then - more importantly - commit yourself fully if you decide to learn. I didn’t give my lessons any time outside of the scheduled teaching, and suffered because of this.
Japanese for Busy People The text book that was (and proably still is) used in the frist year of the UoW Language Centre’s Japanese leisure course.There is also a romaji version if you’re frightened of kana, although there is a kana workbook to help you learn them.
Also availible are volume 2, volume 3, and various things like workbooks and audio casettes/CDs.
Colin: A fairly decent seres from what I’ve seen, although it’s aimed at people wanting to learn Japanese for use the workplace. There’s plenty of other stuff there, but if you’re not following a course you might find something else more interesting.
みんなの日本語(Minna no Nihongo) The first thing you will notice about this book is that the title is in Japanese. The second thing you will notice is that the entirety of the rest of it is too. As such it’s probably more suited to a class where you have a teacher to tell you what’s going on. There are plenty of pictures, however, so if you’ve managed to learn the kana you could probably struggle through it. There is also a book of translation and gramatical notes availible, which does have English explanations.
Colin: It’s quite good, but the lack of any English to explain things makes it difficult to recommend, especially to a beginner. The notes book would help this, but I’m not sure how much.
Kanji Learner's Dictionary The non-traditional methd of kanji lookup used here is easy to learn and simple to use, which is very helpful when you’re trying to look up a set of characters you’re probably hard pressed to write. Provides a single core English meaning, common readings, stroke-order diagrams, and common compounds the kanji is used in.
Colin: It is, as it says, a dictionary for learners. Containing a “mere” 2230 kanji, it is fairly small by kanji dictionary standards, but it provides a lot of information on the ones that are present. Just bear in mind that it is a dictionary, and just because it’s aimed at learners doesn’t mean it’s really going to help you learn the kanji.
WWWJDIC A very helpful web-based dictionary. Traslates words both ways, has various ways of finding kanji, and all sorts of other things. It’s also free to use, which is nice.
Colin: As long as you’re at a computer, this is a very useful dictionary, either for translating words or looking up kanji. Not flawless, but ever so helpful.