What's the best way to learn Japanese without courses?

If I just could get in a level that allows me to read/hear japanese reasonably well, specially for gaming, I would be very happy. But conversational stuff would also be good.

I'm willing to invest my time to seriously study it. What kind of material do you guys recommend? What roadmap should I use?

 

Be prepared for a lifelong study.

 

Good luck. The links maybe will help me too.

Buy CD and my Dreamcast is ready to teach me Japanese.

 

buy a book. I tried Japanese for busy people, but ever since I got　日本語は簡単ですよ！(a polish book)　i didn't try anything else. Japanese for busy people is good just to get some conversation going really fast, but all of the courses are independent and you don't build up your knowledge, you just add to it - that's not for me.

 

Exactly this. After 7 years I'm now able to play RPG games and have conversations. Maybe I'll need other 7 years until I become as proficient as in English.

 

Nice links ASSEMbler, I guess Pimsleur is the way. But what about writing/reading, grammar, etc.? Isn't some traditional books needed too?

My body is ready.

 

As everybody else said: get ready for a lifelong lesson.

I have been studying Japanese for a decade now and can still learn new things everyday...

 

You won't learn Japanese unless you have continued dedication... It is a long hard road, and if you without continuous review you will forget everything you learned in a matter of months.

I tried 3 books before I started studying at university and I found that the one we use in uni was by far the best and most accessible. It focuses greatly on conversational Japanese and contains a very solid foundation of grammar and around 350 basic characters throughout its two volumes.

Genki 1
Genki 2
(24 lessons in total, teaches all the tenses and polite language)

After that, you can try to find "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" - its a book with a blue/white cover.
This one contains 15 lessons that provide a much deeper understanding of polite language, colloquial expressions and writing. There is a big emphasis on the difference between spoken and written Japanese and you will learn how to write different kinds of essays. After this book, you will know around 800 characters and can read around 1200 characters. As a reminder, the Japanese government recommends that you should be able to know 2000 characters to read a newspaper fluently.

After this book is finished, students are supposed to be able to take the same Japanese courses as native speakers.

 

Coincidentally i was googling right now and found this thread in the first result, I remember that there was an old thread were Assembler put up an little pdf for starters.