Absolute Anime

First of all, hello to everyone. I've found this forum while browsing for info on some anime series, and I found it amazing.

I bet that there have been quite a lot of similar questions here before, but I checked the last pages and I didn't find anything about it, so Ithought I could open a new topic.
My desire is to learn a decent amount of japanese in order to understand simple phrases written or said, and being maybe able to answer simple questions.

I don't plan on living in Japan, or having activities that ask me to fluently speak Japan: I just want to be able to understand a bit of it for my personal knowledge.
I know it isn't an easy task, and this is where my question comes: is it possible to do something similar without taking classes with a proper teacher? I checked around where I live but there is no possibility to do such a thing, and so I'm stuck with my curiosity and a lot of material on the net without any help.

Is it possible? Where should I start from? Memorizing hiragana/katakana and then trying to read things? Or trying to translate phrases, learning about them that way?

My native language is italian but I learned a couple of other ones (french and german, and a bit of crappy english as you can see), but they were taught to me and I had some help: is there any possibility to do something about japanese by myself?

Thanks a lot for spending your time reading my first post, and thanks in advance for your answers

Well, I think you should start learning hiragana and katakana if you want to read in japanese.
I don't know if it's possible without a teacher, but....
Your native language is italian? Cool, my mom studied in a italian school, she understands a little bit of it. And I plan studing it.

Thanks a lot for your advice: I guess I'll start praticing in recognizing hiragana and katakana by writing them over and over... if it worked when I had to learn my alphabet, it should work for those two too.
Maybe I won't be able to reach a point where I will be able to read a sentence, but at least I will know something more. It's always somethin good

By the way, if you ever need any help with italian, just let me know

yes, writing the letters over and over works. That's what we do when we learn japanese with a teacher.
Well, if the sentence is only written in hiragana and katakana, you can read it.
But they are more written with kanji too.

Yes I know, kanji are actually the main problem (besides grammar) that I see in a self-study, because there are too many and I don't know where to begin.
I guess that, while learning the "easy part", I'll search for some kind of guide (or something like instruction books on ebay) to help me get started with the most common kanji. This forum already gave me a good start in how to write hiragana and katakana with one of the sticky links that shows how to write them... maybe I'll be lucky enough to find something to help me even past that point

Everytime someone asks about this, I tend to blab on for about 10 pages. :)

I was never lucky enough to have classes nearby either, so I taught myself Japanese. So, yes, it is quite possible to do without a teacher. However, it takes a lot of dedication, practice, and resources.

You should really determine both your lingual strengths and goals before tackling a new language. You say you just want a simple understanding... but what is that going to entail? Because if you just want to know useful phrases, you could easily memorize them without any knowledge of grammar. Yet you also seem to be looking at learning kanji, which is going deeper into the language. I think once you get started, you'll find that it's going to be hard to learn limited pieces of Japanese - for instance, memorizing hiragana and kanji will be useless for reading unless you know grammar patterns and vocabulary as well. Every part builds off the other one, and although it's not necessary to know every last shred of idiomatic phrasing or slang to get a good grasp of the language, you're going to have to work harder at it than you think.

That being said, I recommend learning the very basic fundamentals of the language first. I know a lot of people say you should start off by learning your kana, and that needs to be done too, but I would just recommend looking at simple sentence structure, particles, and parts of the language, etc. Nothing deep, but just get a beginner's feel for how Japanese works before bothering to really commit yourself to it.

Recommended Resources:
Tim's Takamatsu (has a very brief overview plus lotsa info)
Nihongo Resources (has a very detailed overview... but it's a great site)
The book "Teach Yourself Japanese" by Helen Ballhatchet and Stefan Kaiser

Then, I would memorize all your hiragana and katakana.

Recommended Resources:
Kana Chart (really cute site)
The book "Kanji & Kana" by Mark Spahn and Wolfgang Hadamitzky (they also publish a kanji workbook)

From there, it's up to you - you'll usually need to work in a healthy dose of grammar, vocab, and kanji, which can actually be done all at once. (For example, if you're finding words in your grammar examples you don't know, you can make the effort to look up the kanji and memorize it, which will also double as new vocab.)

Recommended Resources:
Online Japanese-English Dictionary
A good Japanese-English dictionary for home (Random House is highly recommended)
Kiki's Kanji Dictionary

Continuously keep in mind what you want to be geared toward, too. Yes, I totally admit it, I was looking to achieve fluency in being able to read manga and J-pop lyrics in Japanese, as well as understanding anime without subtitles. There's different vocabulary to get used to in your typical anime and manga, as opposed to... oh, say, reading a Japanese science textbook.

Anyway, the most important thing about learning Japanese is practice, and I can't stress that enough. Once you've got even a tiny bit of understanding, start trying to translate simple things... like kids' sites at LaLaBit. Doesn't matter if you need to pick up your dictionary a billion times, it really will help you to actively recognize grammar patterns and kanji/kana.

And keep in touch with people who know the language! You can come back here and ask questions if you need to; the AnimeLyrics Forum actually has a really great language section too. And you can always get a Japanese Penpal - there are a lot who are willing to help you with the language.

I think I blabbed on long enough...

By the way, your English is lovely! Too bad I know very little German, and no real French or Italian. Ich liebe Deutsche. :)

Thank you for all those links, Dreams I'm checking some of them and there's quite a lot of things to learn! They seem noob-friendly tho, so they should be good for me.

I understand that only knowing japanese characters isn't enough: it would be like knowing our alphabet from A to Z without any clue about how to use them. I know that in a language everything is related and learning "a bit" of a language isn't that far away from learning it properly: howewer, I have a basic (VERY basic) idea about how japanese works.

I'm not saying that I could build a japanese phrase, but from seeing quite a lot of subbed anime (around 70-75 complete series atm), I understood some minimal parts of the structure. I know about particles and what are they for (and I learned a lot more from a wonderful sticky in this forum), so as I do with the "endings" (-chan, -kun, -san, -sensei,...). This doesn't lead me to a proper understanding, but at least I can understand what is the subject in a simple phrase, and sometimes I can guess when the translated sub is wrong by recognizing some words.
Of course being able to understand the whole phrase is a total different matter, but in all those hours of listening something remained attached to my brain: hopefully it will help me.

I already planned on buying "Teach yourself japanese", as I've seen in another post here, as soon as my credit card will be reactivated , and I'll try memorizing as much as possible from your awesome links.
I guess that, after that, I'll understand if learning japanese is something possible for me or not: I'm confident about learning new languages as I did with english (had a ultra-basic knowledge, learned it all from using it online), but it's indeed a great challenge

By the way, I can't thank you enough for the "penpal" link: it's a great idea and I love it!
I knew this is a great forum

Start by learning hiragana and katakana, after that you should work on vocabulary.

Oh, I know couple of good dictionaries you could be ont he lookout for... lemme find 'em.

For your Japanese-English Dictionary... though, maybe you should be going for Japanese-Latin? I dunno. Anyway. Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary. For Kanji, the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. I studied Japanese formally for a couple of years at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and these are the books used there.