Best way to learn to read Japanese?

[mai]

Mr Khan said:

mai said:

d21lewis said:

How hard is Japanese? Nintendo is a Japanese company and people STILL aren't 100% sure if the word "Nintendo" means "Leave Luck to Heaven"--not even the Japanese.

Not really ;) the writing is the major obstacle for 'white barbarians', but as a person with second native being Tatar any agglutinative language is intuitively understandable for me. But if you're only an English speaker it might be a bit harder for you.

Tatar is like Japanese second cousin, right? Tatar related to Khalka Mongol, which is related to Korean and Japanese.

Well, they do belong to the same family according to vast majority of genetic classifications, yes. But what I mean here is type of morphology, which all these languages share -- morphology (aside from superficial factors like script or phonetics) is what most people regard as "hard" or "easy" to learn -- the good question here to ask is "for whom? what language do you speak natively?".