I thought about posting this on some other recent topics but then decided just to start a new thread.

I like reading about other people's journeys in this wonderful world of Japanese learning. We are all different and it seems that many of those on this forum who are most dogmatic about ONE WAY to do it right are the ones who are been studying the least amount of time. So I'm going to post my journey and encourage anyone interested to post theirs.

I started 4 years ago when I found out I was moving to Japan in six months. I didn't want to be an ugly American so I set out to learn Japanese. I used Rosetta Stone online. I loved it. It was easy, entertaining, I enjoyed doing a lesson each day. And I learned diddly squat (although I didn't realize that until I got here . I went all the way through the first level and despite doing well from the computer's point of view that was pretty much all time wasted.

Switched to Pimseluer. Found it hard (I am very much not an auditory learner) and extremely boring.

Arrived in Japan and quickly realized that I HATED being illiterate. Messed around with various free kanji learning games and the like on the web. The task just seemed overwhelming. Found Heisig's book and for the first time the project seemed doable. Here was a system I could work with and it actually seemed possible for the first time. Eagerly started working through the book until I hit the bit where he recommends making up flashcards for review. Being a lazy person I thought, "Someone may have done this work for me" so I went online and googled, "heisig flashcards". That brought me to this fantastic website and the rest is history.

I finished RTK in about six weeks so I was really plowing through it. Since then I've been doing all the typical things but this post is long enough.

In summary: For me (YMMV),
rosetta stone, complete waste of time
Pimseluer, too boring to work
RTK and this site, absolutely awesome and I'd recommend it to anyone even as a total newbie to the language.

Hehe. Seek and you will find. I came across this site in my attempts to be lazy as well.

Same here. It's kind of funny, if you think about it, that we were too lazy to make our own flashcards and yet we were willing to struggle through the process of memorizing over 2000 kanji.

This is a reoccurring theme. I spent about a 2 years on and off doing Pimsleur and just like for you, it was all pretty much a waist of time. I had this idea that I could somehow learn how to speak Japanese will not learning how to read or write... The only thing I got out of it is that my pronunciation is now pretty good (because you spend hours talking outloud to your computer =-/ ). The problem of course was that after a while learning audio just becomes way to slow.

In the past year a year I'd say I've made the most progress. I did RTK over the summer (you guys are nuts for doing it so fast. Took me ~4 months), then I got bogged down in reviews from about October to December. I just stopped improving (or maybe the RevTK website is wonky). My big mistake was using RevTK instead of Anki; and as far as I know there is no way to export it from RevTK to Anki. So finally I just gave up on that and move on to Tae Kim and now I'm moving along pretty well. Once I finish that I'll prolly get bogged down in something else before figuring out the best way to move forward.

PS: A little off topic but I've been looked at the Anki Core 2000 shared decks. There are several and I'm not sure which one to choose... I'm using Nukamarine's TaeKim deck and it's great, so I'd like to use his Core 2000 one, but it says "One must add the multimedia files to get full benefit of this deck." Anyone know what that's about?