Besides italki, how do/did you learn Japanese?
I have been taking lessons on and off (mainly off) since 2007 and started doing Rosetta Stone about 3 months ago. My collection of Japanese books is fairly large and is growing each day since I live next door to Half Price Books.
I still have a looooooong ways to go, so I was wondering if there was something you found to be extremely helpful during your studies.
For kana and kanji, books Remembering the kana and Remembering the kanji + site kanji.koohii.com
I would use Assimil:Japanese with Ease right from the start. It's written in full Japanese script and in roomaji underneath, so you can start learning with it even if you don't know the kana. It's 100 lessons with bilingual dialogues from the very basic "Good morning, how are you" up to some structures from the JLPT N3. Other than that, JapanesePod101 is also very good, providing many dialogues the same way that Assimil does, full Japanese script/Kana/Roomaji/English. Use what you like the most and remember that you need to repeat what you learn often - for example reread the same text 3 times each day the next 3 days and a week later. Listen once, read while listening once, read without listening once etc. Make sure you enjoy what you use, so you won't get tired while learning from it and repeating the material.
First I used memrise and Remembering the Kanji to learn the 2k Kanji.
And then for a whole summer I used AJATT, 10,000 sentences method and the whole immersion thing (and a little bit of skyping jap people). I did use sharedtalk and chat online with japanese people and use lang-8 to write my japanese writing. I didn't get up to 10,000 sentences though.. after that summer I had about 1,000 sentences but I was pretty comfortable reading Japanese novels after that and watching dramas etc without subtitles. But that summer I was pretty extreme.
I'm learning Korean now and going about a different approach because after that summer of Japanese I burned myself out so I don't know if I would recommend that looking back haha.
nihongo-e-na.com/eng/
This website is really useful. You can find many websites easily for learning Japanese.
I haven't really been learning Japanese, but www.ajatt.com is an amazing resource.