Welcome to Gaia! ::

I just stared taking classes at the nearby community college for Japanese. I probably could have learned it on my own, but it would have been difficult fo me and take a while. I just want to know if it was easier learning by yourselves or in a class.

I learned on my own(as for seeing if i was right, I'd usually ask someone who spoke it at my school) but it would've been easier and more fun to learn in a class.

Same here, I'm starting to download podcasts and try to teach myself some very simple japanese. But really, that's all in prep for the class i'm taking this year xd so really, I feel that it's better to take a class or get tutored. Learning a language as hard as Japanese is difficult to do by yourself -- that's my opinion, at least.

Learning from an educational institution can be helpful, but if you wanna advance ahead, its all self learning. At uni its "aggregate marking" so it kind of pisses me off. Right now, I learn more from self study because the pace that uni japanese goes at is slow, and we dont even get much contact hours [3 hours a week =_=]. So classes are good, just make sure you go ahead and study up harder grammar/vocab if you can. I think that the hardest thing about self learning is just getting the will to make yourself learn the vocab. If you can do that it should be ok.