So I've started teaching myself Japanese...just for fun so not for school or anything, but I know a few of you have studied it so I would love it if you guys shared any online educational tools you know of. So far I've been using Hiragana flash cards (I made them) and have learned about 25.

When I was learning kana (both hiragana and katakana) and couldn't read them yet I used to write Japanese lyrics into romaji form using a list of the kanas so I could read and sing the lyrics. I think it may help some people to remember and learn kana quite fast .

I could try that. So Far I've been able to pair some japanese words into english just by prior knowledge and pairings and I do know a few things like the difference between Watashi and Anata. Hiragana wise I've memorized about 25..I usually mix up two or three but no biggie. I was just wondering if anyone knew any websites I could use. OH ALSO!

LiveMocha! It's an online language learning thing...if you aren't intermediate in the language..I don't suggest it because they don't teach you things like hiragana, kanji, katakana, ect. They only teach phrases!

Neptune's suggestion is right on. Actually using the kana is essential to learning it. I haven't had a Japanese class in nearly 3 years now T_T, but I still remember all the kana (kanji is a different story however...).

I haven't really investigated all of the links, but this site seems to be promising.

http://nihongo-e-na.com/eng/

I took Japanese at my university, and we used the Genki! books, which I found made complete sense to me and were easy enough to learn with. I just checked Amazon, and you can get a used copy for under 15 dollars. It's well worth the money, in my opinion.

To learn kana, the only really way is to practicepracticepractice. Cover an entire page in a single character, and I assure you you'll learn them quickly! Do it on paper rather than with a computer, it will help when you're reading to learn kanji when you have a flow for writing.

I'm not sure of any useful websites =\

Be very careful about using music to learn Japanese, music is written very differently, it often breaks most regular rules and often uses archaic or poetic Japanese. Sailor Moon is especially bad with this, if you went into Japan and spoke as they did in music, you'll end up with a lot of blank-looking Japanese people. Best to go with recent anime and drama. If you are just learning kana from music though, it should be fine but you don't want to for sentence structuring and it may be hard to tell which words are common vocabulary and which words are obscure.

I'm in Japanese 101 at my university. It's awesome. I can try and provide you with helpful sites to learn. Miki is right; you just have to practice kana. We use hiragana way more than katakana though; so my katakana is rusty. After you feel you have the kanas down, don't be afraid to start looking into basic kanji. We just started kanji ourselves. If you want, I can try and help you go over basic stuff (i.e. numbers, time, distance, particles, etc.)