As you might have found out there is a lot of free online resources for learning the Japanese language. Their just too numerous to be listed, but I’ll tell you about a few that I have found so far that works for me.

Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese grammar is what you wished your textbook to be like. I have read many accounts of the difficulty of finding a good textbook, actually I don’t own one due to the lack of good recommendations. So I use Tae Kim’s guide instead. What’s different is the approach to learning a new language:

…The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, “Hi, my name is Smith,” but they don’t tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. They probably decided to use the polite form even though learning the polite form before the dictionary form makes no sense. They also might have decided to include the subject even though it’s not necessary and excluded most of the time. In fact, the most common way to say something like “My name is Smith” in Japanese is to say “am Smith”. That’s because most of the information is understood from the context and is therefore excluded. But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they’re too busy trying to push you out the door with “useful” phrases right off the bat. The result is a confusing mess of “use this if you want to say this” type of text and the reader is left with a feeling of confusion about how things actually work.

From here Tae Kim takes you through Japanese in the best way I have seen so far. To read an interview with Mr Kim himself check out this. An almost classic resource to look up kanji characters or learn Japanese is Jim Breen. This works a lot better than automated translators that I think do not do very well translating between Japanese and English. It is also worth checking out Peter Payne’s introduction to Japanese.

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