I think the first interest for me in japan was an exchange student in my senior year was from japan and graduated with us. I became interested after talking to her quite a bit. Unfortunately I had taken Spanish in High School junior and senior year for university qualifications (i say that, but let’s be honest, living in the US, spanish is definitely more useful…). I almost jumped ship in university and tried Japanese, but i couldn’t get past the fact that I’d have to take an uncredited course for changing from Spanish (that didn’t stop me from taking ancient greek, oddly enough, for a humanities credit). I also kind of wanted to learn Italian, but i was become disillusioned with latin based languages. I never felt like i was able to learn them well enough to speak/listen with any confidence, even after 2yrs of univ. spanish. Then there’s the problem of familiarity with Latin based languages for english speakers. English borrows a lot from most European languages. After having gotten into anime in university (i’d seen a little in HS but that was the early 90s and i grew up rural, so we had very little access back then..only thing i remember watching much of was akira), I became more and more convinced i’d like to learn japanese. I find myself picking up things a lot better in it, but this is also the age of the internet now and I have far more access to materials in the native languages than ever before.

personally, i’ve found using my drawing tablet (wacom intous 3) and ‘writing’ on a drawing program is just as good as paper for practice and note taking while on the computer. you can get their bamboo model for under $100US and there are some more generic models for less if you aren’t planning on using it for anything more than writing input (not to mention all the iphone apps and whatnot utilizing touch screens these days).