Manchester has what I hear is an excellent (but expensive?) class at the Japan Centre North West. I’ll hopefully be joining their lower-intermediate class in September.

In the meantime, if you live in Manchester then you should stop by the International Society. They run cheap but useful language courses every semester (sometimes including Japanese) which could provide a starting point. When you have some conversational skills, there’s a notice board where you can try to find Japanese people who wish to practise your native language.

Then there’s the Manchester Japanese Society who have a number of events each semester. The last one for this academic year will be lunch at a Thai restaurant on the 12th of May so make sure you sign up.

Then, irrespective of location you can take advantage of all the language-learning opportunities that the Internet has to offer. The most practical must be Japanesepod101.com; surely the friendliest internet resource for Japanese learning. The lessons are useful, entertaining and free to listen to (with the option to pay for written materials).

Another possible learning resource is Mixi (ミクシィ), a massively popular social networking site in Japan. The interface is in Japanese and it’s invite only but it isn’t difficult to find someone who’ll oblige. Once you’re set up you can practise writing Japanese in your journal and browse other people’s which is great reading practise*.

Finally, I found the course Oxford Take Off in Japanese very useful. The series is quite well known due to the awards that the Italian version received. With that in mind I tried it and while the story isn’t very exciting the Japanese I learned turned out to be practical and useful for many situations.

* What if you can’t read Japanese? If you use Firefox and/or Thunderbird then I highly recommend Rikaichan, an indispensable tool for reading Japanese and for checking your own. I was just considering writing up how to install/use it when I noticed that Japanesepod101 have just posted a complete lesson on the subject!