Hi

Ive been studying Japanese for about 5 years now. I help out at the ruby kaigi here in Tokyo as well with translation. I'm by no means perfect and still have a long way to go but conversation is no problem. My reading is good enough to read blogs and to an extent magazines but novels is a different story ( I'm working on that). So that said here are my top tips:

1) Are you in this for the long haul? If you are then master learning and writing the kanji first of all. Dont worry, its not as hard as it seems. Your a hacker so your going to appreciate this book "Remembering the Kanji" by "Heisig". Use that book with a site called "Reviewing the Kanji". The author truly is a hacker, his methodology of learning the kanji is absolutely brilliant. I finished the book in 2 months and could write about 70% of those kanji from memory. By 6 months it was closer to 95%. I put this off and i regret this so much. I wasted two precious years of studying by holding this back. You learn so much more through reading. Listening too, but with reading you can control the pace.

2) Pour your heart into the above and then tackle hirigana and katakana. If you've come this far learning those will be a piece of cake.

3) Download anki - a vocab software that uses spaced repetitions ( based on the leitner system ).

4) Buy a good Japanese to english dictionary. The Green Godess is good one. A little over the top for a beginner as its aimed at translators but its full of example sentences. You wont need another dictionary for a long time, maybe ever (one day though you might want to look into a monolingual one for children)

5) Grab the Japanese Grammar reference books published by the Tokyo Times. there a set of 3. For now the first one will do. If you want to save money. Tim Kae's online reference is very good.

6) Start learning basic vocabulary and grammar from the above and using Anki to learn it.

7) You could do this by just diving into reading blogs online. Remember you can write a lot of kanji by now so those funny symbols wont be so alien. Use a firefox / chrome / iphone and ipad plug-in called Rikaichan. This allows you to hover your cursor over a word in Japanese and the meaning will pop-up. This is really good. Place any unknown words you really want to learn into anki along with its sentence. Use your dictionary and grammar reference to write notes on the meaning. Anki will then test you on this at various points in time, increasing the interval period to stretch your memory more and more.

8) When you review in Anki, dont just mentally check your comprehension, write out the words to improve your kanji writing and reading abilities. You'll be amazed at how common some kanji are. Its like the 80/20 rule except more like 60/40. Knowing 40% kanji pronunciations goes a long way.

9) Have fun doing this. Find new words and grammar through the things you love. I do it through reading ruby books, techcrunch.jp, engadget.jp and a host of other famous Japanese websites. If you want to find interesting stuff go Japan's version of delicious called hatena.

10) Don't let not being in the country hold you back. There are ways to create your own environment if you try. My Japanese friend found Western roommates and his English has skyrocketed. Try the same in your neck of the woods. Rent lots of Japanese classics, cook from Japanese cooking boks ( cookpad.com ), learn japanese folk songs to sing at karaoke ( search for lyrics online ), build a gundam model using the Japanese instructions, read Ryan Bates Railscasts transcripts in Japanese over at asciicasts ...you get the idea.

11) Search for the language learning forum - I cant remember the name but its big and full of great advice.

12) Above all make it fun!

good luck!