Does anyone here know Japanese? I could use some advice

I have been learning Japanese for like two years, on and off. (I need to stop taking long breaks though, it makes you forget things) Right now I've got about 460 flash cards with kanji on Quizlet and I was reading http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/ by Tae Kim to learn grammar and how to speak. The thing I'm missing though is practice. Tae Kim's site gives you some minor homework but it's not really enough. I'm willing to pay for something to help me learn. I've checked out some places online a long time ago but was broke and now I finally have the money to pay for a monthly subscription to something. The sites seemed pretty interactive and useful, at least at the time. Does anyone know of a good "thing" for me to use to help me practice Japanese, whatever it might be?

A couple extra points:

• Rosetta Stone was not useful. Maybe for a Romance language or German but Japanese is just too different compared to English and what with a whole new "alphabet".
• I looked around in my area and there aren't any tutors or classes to take in person.
• I don't find Kanji hard to memorize at all. People always said it would be really hard but I haven't found it to be an issue yet. Yeah, I can't write them, but I can easily recognize them. I am kind of running into a little bit of trouble when I hit two that look really similar. Maybe once I learn a few thousand that will be a bigger issue.
• I had a class on Modern China and seeing a lot of Chinese characters on my professor's powerpoints was cool because I knew the meaning of some of them, thanks to knowing some kanji. Chinese always felt uncrackable as a language.

http://japaneseclass.jp/ I've been using this one to learn, not sure if it will help you. Good luck! =)

Do you have Rosetta? (You said you didn't find it helpful). Doesn't that have options for live tutor interactions and the like. I guess another option is to try and find a Japanese penpal online who you talk to on Skype.

Sounds like you have some decent foundation, you need to practise with real people, not an app.

Are you looking to focus more on conversational Japanese, or more comprehension? For conversation, you may want to see if there are any large universities nearby, not for classes, but for a population of Japanese exchange students.

If it is comprehension you're after, once you've got a basic understanding, immersion is the best way to go. Nowadays there are plenty of Youtube channels that are completely in Japanese. Flood your ears with as much Japanese as you can. Even if you might not understand it at first, you'll learn to pick out individual words, phrases, and get a grasp of the structures.

Skritter is a thing you could use. I hadn't practiced writing in years and was having difficulty recalling a lot characters from memory because of it. 5 months after using this (A LOT) I'm now at a point where I can write pretty much anything from memory, and a whole bunch more (almost 3000 characters) that a lot of Japanese themselves never bother learning, simply because this app makes it so easy to do. I only use it for writing, but it can also function as an SRS for reading/recognition.

I can only speak for the iOS version, which I can say is great, but I wouldn't wanna use the web interface and don't know how good the Android version is.

Personally, I took Japanese for 3 years in high school. I would say that one thing that is beneficial to understand is that you learn it like a flood. At first it seems extremely difficult and you only learn drips, but the more you know, the faster you learn.

My advice is to get to the point where you can pick out individual words of spoken Japanese. You might not know what the words MEAN, but once you can pick out individual words and it doesn't sound like one big vomit of gibberish, just start watching tons of anime dubs. You'll start to learn new words and their context. Then you'll even to get to the point that I'm at where you can hear a phrase and be like "oh, they translated that poorly." "or, I would have translated that differently."

I lost interest years ago in anime, but if you keep up the interest, you will learn it.

I guess you can probably get away with only being able to recognize kanji and not write them, but it is generally harder to learn to write them than read them so that's probably what people were talking about.

I personally found the Rosetta Stone app on iOS to be great. Granted I'm not as far along as you, but I learned a lot from just the trial.

Other then that, I'd echo what others are saying and recommend watching lots of anime with English subs. I personally did this and it helped a lot in learning the context of certain words. Also the frequency at which they say "Kawaii" (cute), but that could have been the anime I was watching. It's also jarring when they speak English because it's usually grammatically incorrect, or spoken with such a heavy accent it's nearly incomprehensible.

Also, what is your goal in learning the language? Is it to speak? Read? Write? Or just general comprehension? Or all of the above?

I'm actually really interested in hearing what anyone else has to say. I took 1 year of Japanese my senior year of college, and I haven't had any practice for a whole year now. I'd really like to get back into learning again, both writing and conversation.

I learned on Book 1 of Genki 2nd edition (on left in pic). Anyone else learn on these books? Do you think picking up Book 2 would be helpful if I teach myself

@onionknight14: if you have an iOS device, I would recommend downloading the trial of Rosetta Stone and seeing if you like it. Despite what the OP said, I really liked it.

@poisonjam7: Ok, cool thanks! If I end up liking it, do you know if Rosetta Stone ever has any deals to get it for cheaper (later down the line)?

It maybe just me but at first I tried learning from books and some websites. It helps with some stuff but is not perfect and mos def not the way to go If you really want to speak language like native. If you are willing to spend some money the best way is to have classes with native speakers. There are no tutors in your area so maybe try someone online that would talk with you over Skype. It comes to that because the living language is totally different from the one in books. There are so many neologisms that are not yet in dictionaries and books but people use them all the time.

Then again if you are doing it just for fun basics may be enough. Watching anime/movies/ tv programs is really nice way to go since that way you are able to learn speech patterns that are occurring daily.

As for the Kanji. If you can recognize them its pretty good start but writing may be more difficult and you should practice that. For similar characters it may be hard but if you know what is the meaning of the parts of the character (the radicals) you may get the basic meaning and pronunciation from that. My favorite example from Chinese for that is 电脑 - computer because the first character is electric the second one is used for head/brain. Electronic brain it has to be a computer, right?

This goes to every foreigner that tries to speak Japanese. Matter of the fact everyone that tries to speak any foreign language but learned it abroad.

Oh and by the way if you are interested with learning Chinese having basic Japanese knowledge is a nice beginning. That was the way I went with going from Japanese to Chinese and now Korean.

I really recommend the app HelloTalk.

There are lots of Japanese users that want to talk and practice their English and are willing to help you with your Japanese. It's a great app!

@onionknight14: I don't think so. It sucks that they make you buy the entire package for $130 instead of letting you buy each level by itself.