Learn to read

i would like to learn to read japanese. what is the best method for this?

Mind melting

Kidnap a few Jap hotties, like Kim did.

If you're just talking about read the kanas, then what I did was you take a blank sheet of printer paper and a fine-tip marker, and find a chart organizing them by vowel, and write those 5 at the top, and write them over and over, once you feel you can write them in any order without looking at the previous ones, move onto the next row, but after you've written all those, re-write the first ones a few times, in that fashion. Takes only a few days before you can implement it and read.

Is it really that simple, though? What about learning the syntax and everything? So that I'm not reading it and end up with a sentence that is just a bunch of characters together and I don't know what goes together to make a word?

>>5
Life must be very difficult for you.

>>6
How did you know??

>>5

Learning to read Japanese is =! learning how to understand it.
Reading kana is easy. You can do that well in just a couple weeks.
If you want to learn the grammar, you have to learn the language.

And if you REALLY want to read Japanese, you're gonna need to learn to joyo kanji too... 1,945 of them, I believe.

Give up, nobody ever becomes fluent in Japanese other than the Japs themselves.

>>10
Yeah, but I don't care if I become fluent, I'm never gonna go to Japan anyways. I just want to learn for my own pleasure.

>>12
Install rikaichan, do some basic grammar from "Guide To Japanese", and you're pretty much done.