1) There's a vibrant japanese learning community on the web that likes to talk about language learning in general; sites of note are http://www.alljapaneseallth

1) There's a vibrant japanese learning community on the web that likes to talk about language learning in general; sites of note are http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/ http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/ and http://www.antimoon.com/ http://www.antimoon.com/ (about english learning). 2) Get a copy of Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/ http://ichi2.net/anki/) and load it up with the things you want to remember. If I were starting a new language, I'd do this with sentences from a textbook. As you get better, you can take sentences from things you're reading or from dictionaries, wikipedia, twitter (my favorite), or anything else. There are lots of theories on language learning, and it's hard to pin down what works. Some people thing the above suggestions are crazy and will tell you so, loudly. But you since you're doing things yourself, you can just try stuff. If you don't like something or if you don't think it's working for you, then change it. You might structure it something like Scrum: have a fixed study iteration that starts with a planning session and culminates with an assessment. The assessment could be a different depending on what you're studying; maybe a conversation with a native speaker on the subject of what you've been studying that week. Maybe a trial run of a standardized test you're studying for. Maybe watching the same TV show at 3 week intervals to see how much your comprehension improves. Depending on the result, then plan your text 2-3 weeks of study accordingly. For me at least, that seems like about as long as I can stick to any particular study plan without burning out anyhow. ... actually, I kind of like this idea, maybe I'll try it for my Japanese. :)