I’ve learned how to read all of hiragana and katakana and now i don’t know if i should start learning the vocab and grammar or if i should start learning kanji? because since I don’t know any vocab at all, learning how to read has been pretty useless so far since i don’t even know what im reading. where should i go from here?
6 comments
What ever you seem fit tbh but if I was personally in your shoes I’d learn vocab and kanji. Since you’d pretty much encounter a bunch of kanji
Do a little of everything as you go. Hyperfixating on only one aspect of the language will be harder in the long run.
I would recommand getting a textbook and following the plan lessons there. They will give you both grammar and vocabulary + you can try to read texts they give you too. The text will have furigana written above the kanjis or will be written only in hiragana and Katakana.
Vocab and grammar are the next logical steps. You won’t be able to read much until you have a basic grasp of Japanese sentence structure and know at least 800-1000 common words. You can do grammar and vocab at the same time. See [here for some simple advice and resources.](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I recommend you avoid studying the Joyo kanji in isolation. It’s a huge hill to climb and can easily discourage you. I recommend learning words (vocab) with kanji in them. That way you’ll learn to recognize all the kanji in your vocab and their useful readings. Also don’t worry too much about writing kanji at this stage. You can do that later if you feel like it.
After failing RTK 3 times, I gave up learning kanji separately. Now I just learn them as I learn words and I just wish I had made that choice earlier. And this is where anki is a life saver for Japanese, since I am forced to properly recognize shit or else I’ll be doing the card forever. You’ll feel like pounding your head against a wall sometimes, but I promise it’ll get easier. I think it was around the 3-4 week mark that learning new words was noticably easier. And then just learn grammar on the side. Vocab > grammar. I learned this with Spanish as I spent all my time learning grammar then 6 months later realized I don’t understand native content cause I just don’t know enough words. If you know words, grammar will a lot of the time make intuitive sense. Good luck!
I think you should start learning vocabulary and grammar WITH kanji!
Grammar has words in it, and words have kanji! So if you learn to recognize the kanji for words that show up a lot in your practice sentences for grammar, then you learn everything together!
Or things look a little familiar when you do focus on kanji specifically.
I feel like I said this weird, hope this makes sense!
Do your best!! Have fun!!