Best way to learn to read Japanese?

[theprof00]

rolltide101x said:

Lafiel said:

rolltide101x said:

By default Rosetta Stone has Kanji/Furigana as how it reads I should change that to Hirigana and Katakana?

 

Also from what I am reading Rosetta Stone is not a great way to learn Japanese

uhm, I don't know how the Rosetta Stone programm is structured, but as I said, simply learning the 100~ characters of the Hiragana/Katakana syllabaries should come prior to learning any words or anything

most of the japanese words are written in Kanji, but each sentence usually contains Hiragana characters aswell and if something is using Furigana it means that the reading of a Kanji-based word is written above it in Hiragana, so you can atleast read how it is pronounced once you can read Hiragana

Can you link me to exactly what you are talking about so I am sure to study the correct thing?
Like this?

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_hiragana.htm

hiragana is the alphabet standard. Think of it as writing cursive, except you would write in cursive all the time
katakana is a stylized alphabet. Think of it as writing typeface except you would only use it for people's names, cool things, and foreign words
Kanji is the pictograph. Every word can be written in any three ways (for the most part)

Kanji is like....classic words...core fundamental words. Rice, cow, animal, place, house, etc. There are very few kanji for newer things. That is where katakana comes in.

When a kanji is used for many words, there are often endings done in hiragana. liiike eating is "taberu", which is also "tabemasu". In kanji, the symbol only stands for the sound "tabe", because as you can see, endings change to say different things. There is:
taberu
tabemasu
tabemasuka
taberaremasu
tabesaseraremasu

As you can see the only core part of the word that never changes is tabe...therefore, because kanji doesn't change, it only takes the place of tabe. Then you add the endings with cursive, so you get:

[Kanji] ru
or
[kanji] masu