Here is how you learn Japanese. It’s not easy.. at first, it’s downright impossible, but it’s the most genuine way (short of moving to Japan, of course). Here’s what you do (please click “read more” below if you don’t see the clip):

1. Watch this, try to pick up as much as you can.
2. Watch it again, but relax a little bit.
3. Watch it again and try to write down or type everything you hear (you don’t have to write down the kanji.. roomaji or カタカナ are fine)
4. If necessary, keep on watching it again and again until you can write down everything you hear.
5. Translate what you have.
6. Watch it again, pretend you didn’t have to do all that (yes, the pretending is important psychologically) and that you’re just watching Japanese programming and understanding it.

This should help by vastly improving your listening skills (the most important language skill of all! any monkey can spit out sentences!!) and, if you weren’t able to do it, to give you a good idea of how far you have to go. For example, if you just couldn’t comprehend anything, you might need to just do a lot of practice speaking and listening. If you can’t tell where one word begins or where one ends, or you can’t seem to find anything in the dictionary, either you need more listening practice, or you simply need to learn more verb conjugations (the main source of “I can hear it, but it’s not in the dictionary”) or more particles. If you hear fine and can figure out most of the words, but it’s really slow go, then you need to just learn a lot more vocabulary (this is where I am) and the best way to help is to keep on doing this!

I recommend watching UTB Hollywood as much as you can on youtube (their channel and their MySpace, and you can even watch their stuff on their website) and, if you’re in Southern California, watch KXCI channel 18 from 6:00AM to 7:00AM on weekdays and I guess in the evening on weekends. If you are absolutely in the beginner’s stage and couldn’t complete this exercise, it’ll still help you, since you’re training your brain to hear the sounds and the speech patterns. Just remember, you can’t learn through osmosis, but some skills simply require constant exposure, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t understand a single word at first. There was a point in time (when you were a baby) when you couldn’t understand your native language.