Having spent 2 years learning an Asian language (Mandarin
Chinese) and having talked to the people across the hall
learning Japanese I can tell you that it's not easy and
will require an inordinate amount of time to actually
understand enough to be useful other than saying thank you
and hello type stuff.Unlike Latin/Euro based languages you will almost never find a
root to hold onto to help you figure out what it is (3 years
of German was CAKE compared to Japanese) My advice.... -give up trying to write it, you'll never learn a significant
number of charachters in a limited timespan -get college level texts (tapes probably available to go
along with the text so you actually know how it's supposed
to be spoken -find someone who is fluent in japanese to teach you the
more common things -hack a Japanese version of sesame street off your satellite
dish.... "the letter B is brought to you by fuji heavy
industries" You MIGHT learn an appreciable amount if you spend 2-3 hours
a day for the next 8 months, otherwise you'll miss 2/3 of
the conversation. You're lucky, the students in my Chinese class and the people
from the Japanese class came to the consensus that Japanese
was a good bit easier to learn.
rich 
TT-less for not much longer
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