Well... to give you specific pointers, I would have to know more about where you are in your studies. However, the following are general pointers that would apply to anybody. You may have already figured all this stuff out yourself, and judging from your level you obviously are past some of them, but it is my generic list, as it were.
1) No romaji. Ever. DO NOT STUDY JAPANESE in romaji. Learn your hiragana and katakana and study real written Japanese. Never buy a book that teaches in romaji and avoid even the ones that teach in both Japanese and romaji unless you find one that is really good. It's very hard when you are first starting out to peel your eyes away from the romaji and focus on the kana, and you just do not need the extra difficulty.
I cannot express how important this is. To give you an idea of the pace you want to hit if you are aiming for actual fluency, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries should not take you more than a couple of weeks each to master. That will seem relaxed once you start kanji.
2) Start learning kanji sooner rather than later. I learned the jyouyou list plus the extra 114 required for the JLPT level 1 at a breakneck pace and it still took me a year and a half. Okay, side story (not relevant, but I love it so much I have to tell you)... I had a notebook into which I wrote each kanji, with example words, as I learned it. I put the last one in at the top of Mt. Fuji.
The maddening thing is that until you hit about 1000 or so, the ones you know are close to useless. Every sentence you read has too many kanji you don't know for the ones you do know to have any context. They start to be of use at around 1000... by 1500 they are significantly useful, and when you hit about 2000 you can call yourself literate. If you're like me, it will be very helpful to keep something that shows your progress (otherwise it is easy to despair). I had a Word file with all the kanji I needed to learn in blue. I greyed each one out as I learned it, so I could watch the chart slowly change color.
3) One of your first serious tasks is to get a working comprehension of the basic structure of the language. Know what a grammatical subject is, what a grammatical topic is, and which one Japanese focuses on and why and how. This is the primary regard in which Japanese grammar is fundamentally dissimilar to English. It's not a question of in which order the S, V, and O appear in Japanese. The S, V, and O paradigm does not even fit. Learn your は and が early... I still make mistakes with them.
4) Have an organized plan of attack and good sources. I am a straight-up book learning type, and if you think at all like me I recommend just getting the test specifications for the JLPT. There is a list of vocabulary, a list of kanji, and a list of grammar. The vocabulary and kanji can be done using dictionaries. The only part you are going to have to go hunting around for is the grammar.
The grammar falls out into what I would call "raw grammar" and "patterns". Raw grammar is stuff like verb inflections, the conditionals, and so forth. "Patterns" include idiomatic expressions and all that good stuff. Both are listed in the test specs (it basically goes from raw grammar at levels 4 and 3 to patterns at levels 2 and 1).
For raw grammar the source you want is the Japan Times' "A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" series. Right now they have "A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" and "A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar". Those two are enough for pretty much everything I run into.
For patterns I recommend this site、which totally kicks ass:
http://ws.31rsm.ne.jp/~toolware/dict...ictionary.html
It's in Japanese, but by the time you are worrying about patterns that shouldn't be a problem. There are some good books out there, too.. I recently picked up 日本語の重要表現文型, from 専門教育出版. The explanations are not as good as on that site, but it is more comprehensive in terms of which patterns it hits.
5) Switch to Japanese only materials as soon as possible (the Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar are the only mixed source I use now). That includes your dictionary lookups. By the time you know 1500 kanji or so, you should NOT be using bilingual dictionaries anymore. Unfortunately, I do not know any online sources for kanji that are really great, although you can find tolerable ones with a google search. For words, do not was your time with anything other than Goo:
dictionary.goo.ne.jp (note: no "www")
They even give you the accent, so you can distinguish how to pronounce 端, 橋, and 箸, for example.
6) Last... and you knew this was coming, but if you want to become truly conversant, you will have to live for for at least a year or two.
Drake
