Where can we learn Japanese online?

Is there any place online where I can learn Japanese that is 100% free?

• All the websites I find are free 14 day trial, or pay a fee to use their site. I have no experience with the language. Also, those of you that have experience, can you recommend any good text books to learn from--like those you used in college or high school?

• Answer:

  Hey, I am a university student completely my minor in japanese and i would recommend texts known as "genki". I only started last year but i have already been to japan and communication problems were minimal. What i want to warn you of, is that trying to teach yourself purely from dictionaries is quite dangerous. I offered to help an american friend "get better" at jap, (he had been teaching himself) but when we started talking he had taught himself allllllll wrong. The japanese language has many "forms" which make it easy enough to learn (unlike them trying to learn english) but there are certain grammatical structures that must be adhered to-- i.e verb at the end of the sentence@@--this friend of mine was simply stringing words together for example "i want water" in japanese should be mizu ga hoshii desu--or---mizu o nomitai water (i want) water (i want to drink) and he was coming out with hoshii mizu (want water)--i was able to understand because i now know the structures,,,but chances are a japanese person would laugh :) anyways its a long winded answer, but i recommend those texts, and if you can't get these texts straight away-- find a site( there are soooo many) to learn hirigana and katakana--once you can read at least these 2 forms of japanese you are well on your way to being able to utilise a lot more of the web's resources. If you have any other questions you can ask me--just know that i have studied japanese for only a year--so my responses may be limited if they aren't conversational and necessary communicational questions!! ganbattane!! (good luck)