italki is golden, I was using it for Vietnamese exchange and Japanese paid lessons and it rocks. I can recommend a JP teacher called Misa on there, she also has an interesting JP language learning blog. Misa was based in JP when I started with her, but she travels around the world using italki as her income, she's an interesting person to talk to. I also hit up tons of cute VN girls and became moderately close to some of them, one of them (a married housewife who was at home with a baby and constantly bored during the day) I was trying to get her to take her top off and engage in Skype sex, I didn't succeed in this but she nevertheless messages me frequently to reinitiate the dialogue, I haven't responded because I have a cute real life Vietnamese gf now (and learning new words at a great rate). Anyway, if you can learn a language and practice pickup at the same time it's not a bad deal, you might have a lay waiting for u when u get there
I have also found the picture-in-picture of yourself in Skype to be useful for practicing your vibe and facial expressions.
About JP learning, I use "Minna no Nihongo", I have some mixed feelings about this but overall I would recommend it. A friend finished "Minna no Nihongo" and proceeded to "New Approach" and that's also supposed to be good. However, if you are a beginner I
highly recommend Tae Kim's "Guide to Japanese" which is free on the web. It doesn't have much vocabulary (Minna no Nihongo is strong on vocabulary but the vocabulary is in a separate book called the "Translation and Grammatical Notes" which is a gotcha, the main book doesn't have any English in it), but Tae Kim's guide gives you lots of useful grammar and howto's, plus a proper basic understanding of the underlying system which the other books are especially weak on, since they try to teach by example, yet the examples are obscured by use of polite speech.
As an example "karita" means "I [or some other implied pronoun determined from context] borrowed", and "hon" means "book". A useful grammar that forms the foundation of nearly all Japanese grammar is "VERB NOUN" which means in English "
the NOUN
that VERB", for instance "karita hon" means "the book that I [or whoever] borrowed". However, the usual resource books will not teach you "karita" because it might be rude to use with superiors, so they only teach you the polite form "karimashita". This is utterly useless because you cannot say e.g. "karimashita hon", you have to say "karita hon" and there is nothing rude about that. Nobody should learn stuff like "-mashita" until they already have a basic grasp of the language, its grammar, and building blocks, and that's where "Minna no Nihongo" and its ilk really fall down (because most if not all of the grammar exercises are just teaching you to unlearn what you already learnt) and where Tae Kim really shines, because you learn the way a child would learn.
Also check out "Mangajin" magazine and "Mangajin's basic Japanese through comics" textbook, very useful. These are no longer in print but available to download or read on the web.
As a seducer you will never want to use polite speech in Japanese, it sounds really weak and pathetic. So go to Tae Kim, learn the casual (normal / childish) speech, and get used to calling yourself "Ore", never "Watashi", maybe "Boku" with superiors. I went to Japan for a week to do cold approach and I never used polite speech even once, it didn't even occur to me to be honest, the only times I ever used it in the past were with my supervising professor and my girlfriend's parents and it's useful for that, but otherwise useless, so don't fall into the trap of following the textbook here! Get it right from the beginning and your experience will be so much more rewarding, as you'll form closer relationships with everyone you meet.
Ray
Edit: Just realized this is an old thread but anyway hope the advice is useful, I may try memrise since I'm sick of having to orepare my own flash cards from Minna no Nihongo vocab.
