I’ve studying kanjis using Anki, I take the kanjis from a 1000 most common words that I get on the internet, then add to Anki. I have 2 decks, the first with the kanjis/ pronunciation and meaning, the second with phrases using these kanjis.
My question is how you get to go from learning kanjis to actually reading japanese? What content you use to do that? When I try normally I get to understand too little of it, so I would like some opinions about what kind of content I should use to start reading actual japanese.
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Are you only learning kanji? Do you know anything about Japanese grammar? Cause if you don’t, understanding Japanese sentence will be mostly impossible.
Crystal Hunters is a manga made for Japanese learners. There is also graded readers and Manabi reader app. 😸
Manga which have furigana (i.e. Yotsubato!) work well to begin with. I at least was able to focus on the Kanji, and only use the furigana when I had to. Then, there are manga which only have partial furigana … meaning only for advanced Kanji (meant to allow teenagers who don’t yet know all the Kanji to read them).
However, there are two major ways to study a language: through audio and audiovisual media, and through reading. And this distinction doesn’t matter as much with most languages, since you can fairly easily use both at the same time. Even with something like Hebrew or Russian, the writing system is not that big of a hurdle. Your progress in listening comprehension will help your reading comprehension along, and vice versa, pretty much from the get go.
In my experience, that doesn’t happen in Japanese, early on. And by early on, I mean at any time before advanced level. Reading/writing is too much of a thing of its own. So, instead, I would suggest to decide on one path or the other:
If you are truly passionate about reading, then you should learn through reading. Study your Kanji, read progressively more difficult materials, use readers, and do massive amounts of extensive reading. I’m confident that this method works. I didn’t follow it, but I know many people who have, and are progressing just as fast, sometimes faster, than myself. So it works, but it requires A LOT of reading. That’s something you have to love doing, to be able to get yourself to do it.
But the majority of people, especially these days, aren’t into sitting around and reading for hours upon hours every day. Myself included (I used to be into reading, and learned English mostly through reading, but now I almost always go for the audiobook instead). And, for people like this, I would recommend ignoring Kanji altogether for a while, and just working with Kana and becoming an advanced level listener of Japanese. Learning the Kanji might help a little bit with this, but nowhere near enough to justify the massive amount of time spent on it. People will tell you that “Kanji is an organic part of Japanese, and therefor you cannot learn Japanese without it”, and other such bs, but these people are silly perfectionists/idealists. Not only can you become an advanced listener (and speaker, if you wish, and have the opportunity to practice speaking) of Japanese without Kanji, you will get there much faster.
After you’re advanced level at spoken Japanese (and Kana), learning how to read and write should be far easier…since one can rely on native resources, which (if you like Japanese culture, and frankly you shouldn’t be studying Japanese if you don’t) are far more enjoyable and reliable than study materials aimed at foreigners.