Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.
Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows.
It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto).
Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
