learning japanese

hey all... i've been trying to find a decent way to learn japanese in my spare time.  i'm an active college student, but definitely have multiple hours downtime every day.  i've heard 'remembering the kanji' is good for... well... remembering the kanji.  past that i've got no real good plans for getting a grammatical base down.  since it's mostly for personal knowledge, i'm ok with and tend to favor ideas involving immersion in popular culture (i.e. watching tv shows/animes/reading etc).  any thoughts?

buy genki. should be the best for the beginning.

First of all, do yourself a favour and learn hiragana. All the good textbooks use this as a base, because its easier to transfer from simple hiragana to kanji at a later stage. The small characters you see above some kanji are called 'furigana', and are basically hiragana, but are used to explain the pronunciation of more complex kanji.

http://www.kanjistep.com/  - This website helped me alot when I first started. It will help you learn hiragana, and has games for testing you.

As far as textbooks go, alot of universities use the 'Minna No Nihongo' series. They come with tapes as well, and are of a normal price for a university textbook, however you will need about four texts from the series to give yourself a full grasp of the basics.

And when it all gets a bit much, this site will help you chill and give you a laugh. Its full of video's of famous american actors doing silly Japanese adverts that they think willy never be seen outside of Japan lol..

http://www.japander.com/

inb4 AJATT

AJATT.

But really you should get basic stuff down. Either Genki, or Japanese for Busy People(kana version) is a good basic starting point. "All About Particles" is very helpful. Looking on Amazon there are two copies by Power Japanese, I'm not quite sure what the difference is, or if there is one, because they are about the same size, by the same author, but one is cheaper.

Once you have basic stuff down like "You are nice" or "I am angry" or just a basic grasp on basic stuff THEN go with immersion. I think you will absorb everything faster, and enjoy it much more by knowing certain words and then seeing how words you don't know act on the words you do know and seeing if you can figure out the word based on the context.