Brilliant idea, website and judging by amazon, execution.
Im sure you will be having a great new year!
One question: Are your beds flame-retardant?
And if so what are your views on flame retardant mattresses?
Ive read somewhere that in America all beds have to be flame retardant but recently their overall safety is being questioned (chemicals and fumes etc).
Ive been studying Japanese for about 5 years now. I help out at the ruby kaigi here in Tokyo as well with translation. I'm by no means perfect and still have a long way to go but conversation is no problem. My reading is good enough to read blogs and to an extent magazines but novels is a different story ( I'm working on that). So that said here are my top tips:
1) Are you in this for the long haul? If you are then master learning and writing the kanji first of all. Dont worry, its not as hard as it seems. Your a hacker so your going to appreciate this book "Remembering the Kanji" by "Heisig". Use that book with a site called "Reviewing the Kanji". The author truly is a hacker, his methodology of learning the kanji is absolutely brilliant. I finished the book in 2 months and could write about 70% of those kanji from memory. By 6 months it was closer to 95%. I put this off and i regret this so much. I wasted two precious years of studying by holding this back. You learn so much more through reading. Listening too, but with reading you can control the pace.
2) Pour your heart into the above and then tackle hirigana and katakana. If you've come this far learning those will be a piece of cake.
3) Download anki - a vocab software that uses spaced repetitions ( based on the leitner system ).
4) Buy a good Japanese to english dictionary. The Green Godess is good one. A little over the top for a beginner as its aimed at translators but its full of example sentences. You wont need another dictionary for a long time, maybe ever (one day though you might want to look into a monolingual one for children)
5) Grab the Japanese Grammar reference books published by the Tokyo Times. there a set of 3. For now the first one will do. If you want to save money. Tim Kae's online reference is very good.
6) Start learning basic vocabulary and grammar from the above and using Anki to learn it.
7) You could do this by just diving into reading blogs online. Remember you can write a lot of kanji by now so those funny symbols wont be so alien. Use a firefox / chrome / iphone and ipad plug-in called Rikaichan. This allows you to hover your cursor over a word in Japanese and the meaning will pop-up. This is really good. Place any unknown words you really want to learn into anki along with its sentence. Use your dictionary and grammar reference to write notes on the meaning. Anki will then test you on this at various points in time, increasing the interval period to stretch your memory more and more.
8) When you review in Anki, dont just mentally check your comprehension, write out the words to improve your kanji writing and reading abilities. You'll be amazed at how common some kanji are. Its like the 80/20 rule except more like 60/40. Knowing 40% kanji pronunciations goes a long way.
9) Have fun doing this. Find new words and grammar through the things you love. I do it through reading ruby books, techcrunch.jp, engadget.jp and a host of other famous Japanese websites. If you want to find interesting stuff go Japan's version of delicious called hatena.
10) Don't let not being in the country hold you back. There are ways to create your own environment if you try. My Japanese friend found Western roommates and his English has skyrocketed. Try the same in your neck of the woods. Rent lots of Japanese classics, cook from Japanese cooking boks ( cookpad.com ), learn japanese folk songs to sing at karaoke ( search for lyrics online ), build a gundam model using the Japanese instructions, read Ryan Bates Railscasts transcripts in Japanese over at asciicasts ...you get the idea.
11) Search for the language learning forum - I cant remember the name but its big and full of great advice.
re: not trusting the BBC - smart move. I'm from England and lots of people regard it as the most unbiased source out there, that and the guardian but if you step back and look critically at them you realise just how bad things are. I'd advise anyone to swingby medialens.org and read some of their articles and buy their books, especially their new one. Unblievable stuff.
Bio: Learning Japanese and now able to read programming, business and general how-to books and communicate via email using Kanji. Reading literature with its flowery vocabulary and Kanji though is still very hard. Can write under 1500 - 2000 Kanji and know nearly a pronunciation for each symbol though there are many many more and far from fluent. I've also started to do some basic translation (Japanese to English) and helping out at Japans Annual Ruby Conference this year with translation. About 5 years in.
From personal experience:
The biggest factor in how fast you improve during your studies is environment. Noticed I said during your studies. Simply being immersed isn't good enough. To create your environment you can (in order of effectiveness):
Find a boy/girlfriend who natively speaks the language. Its best if they cant speak yours. This is steroids for your language learning.
Failing that find roomates - the more the better. Nearly as good.
It doesn't matter if your stuck in your home country - I've met Japanese people who rock at English just because they either had a lazy English speaking partner who couldn't be bothered to learn the lingo or likewise lazy roommates.
Start reading websites, magazines, listening to music and watching films or youtube all in your target language. Pursue your interests as much as possible using your new language. If you like hip-hop then listen to underground hip-hop artists via youtube. Grab their lyrics from the net and translate. Sing it out-load in the shower.
Skype for discussions, Lang8.com for writing blogs and peer review etc etc etc
If your looking at becoming very conversational (talk about wide range of subjects comfortably but not yet bling bling) then its going to be 3 years plus. With that in mind you have to be a well oiled machine with vocabulary management, just being 10% more efficient with your vocabulary means a saving of 3-4 months and compared to the traditional use of lists on paper, software such as Anki helps you be at least 20% more efficient.
Assuming your in this for the long haul, don't neglect the reading and writing part for languages with scripts or "funny" symbols. Rather prioritize it since being able to read books and magazines will help you grasp how things are said naturally. You'll meet new words everyday and come across them time and time again in context helping you internalize them faster. Unlike conversation, you control the pace when reading and its more comfortable for beginners and intermediates. I tried learning Kanji the way native Japanese people do and failed miserably. I tried some books most crap but one gem called "Remembering the Kanji" was absolutely amazing. In 2months I got through 2000kanji and by 6 could draw every single one from memory. And there were faster learners than me! I'm sure there's something for Arabic script if that's tricky.
Get the basic tools. Get a learners dictionary to start. Once you start getting better, try an Arabic dictionary for Arabic kids i.e. no English written whatsoever. Ideal would be a dictionary for the pc to aid faster lookups via copy and paste. Don't by cheap crap though as it will probably have awful explanations and old fashioned examples ending up in you sounding like someones granddad.
Likewise look for a good grammar reference.
Get a dictionary plugin for Firefox. I use rikaichan for Japanese. I simply hover over a word and the definition pops up instantly. Very handy.
Lastly implement all of the above slowly one by one, remember Rome wasn't built in a day and have fun.
Lesson learned - have an opinion and be controversial
Ive often wondered how I would feel if I wrote a post that p*d the hell out of a lot of people. Looking at the marketing result I'd say I'd be smug happy as hell.
One question: Are your beds flame-retardant?
And if so what are your views on flame retardant mattresses?
Ive read somewhere that in America all beds have to be flame retardant but recently their overall safety is being questioned (chemicals and fumes etc).