Online Japanese Lessons Aren’t the Only Way to Learn Japanese
I am a self-confessed language nut. I love learning languages. I will go for days just watching Univision (an American Spanish-language television network) in order to brush up on my Spanish. I will listen to opera to perfect my Italian pronunciation, and I have even been known to watch old World War II movies to learn new German words and study the accent.
Japanese, however, has always eluded me. I suppose those same World War II movies could give me a few choice Japanese words to mimic, but I may not want to use them in mixed company.
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One of the wonderful things about learning Spanish or Italian or French is that we all use the same letters, and with few exceptions, the letters sound vaguely similar. If you take a close look at something written in Spanish, you might be able to see the roots of the words and make some sense of what you see. In fact, without ever taking a class in Spanish, you probably know 10% of the language already.
It really isn’t easy to learn Japanese online. In fact, it isn’t easy to learn Japanese at all. In my quest to learn the language before taking a trip to Japan, I spent three long semesters in a college Japanese class and eventually flunked out my last semester. I tried to learn Japanese by myself, and eventually gave up when a Japanese friend made fun of my pronunciation.
When learning a new language, all you usually need to worry about is how to speak it, how to recognize words, and how to write it. If you are learning Japanese, you know that there is one more thing you need – 
Before going to Japan early last year, I had already spent two long years studying the Japanese language and felt I was pretty fluent. I could speak Japanese conversationally, and could recognize more than my fair share of characters. Unlike other languages that I had learned (Spanish, Italian, and French), Japanese was completely different obviously, but I thought I had a real feel for it.
I remember the first day of Spanish class in high school. The teacher stood at the front of the board and asked us all the Spanish words we already knew. Our minds went blank and we said that we didn’t know any. Of course, we were wrong! We knew “taco” and “hola”, and we used “si” and “como estas” almost regularly. By the time we had opened up our minds and revealed all we knew, it was clear that we already had a pretty good feel for the language.