What is the best way to learn to speak Japanese, and read it?
You should take a class if you can, and learn to speak, read, and write at the same time. Japanese has two phonetic alphabets, hiragana, used for Japanese words and particles. Katakana is used mainly for words borrowed from other languages and sometimes used for expressing sounds and emotions. It also uses Kanji which are Chinese characters. Definitely take a class, at least to begin with. Grammatically speaking, Japanese is very different from English so there’s a lot to learn and you don’t want to risk forming bad habits early on. Also, when you start, a lot of people start off reading in romaji in which Japanese is written in roman letters that correspond to the sounds. I would strongly advise against this. If you’re trying to learn hiragana, using roman letters won’t help you reinforce what you’ve learned and may actually make you lazy towards learning Japanese writing. I used to listen to a couple of Japanese pop artists and I would read along in the booklet that came with an albu
