Which is more important to learn first, after kana? Kanji, grammar or what?

4 comments

1. A little of everything 🙂

2. so im like, still pretty green, but feel like im over the initial walls a year and a half in, at least. ultimately, i think picking *something* to learn and just doing it is the the biggest thing. learning imperfectly is better than not learning, yknow? find a direction, be it the genki books, some easy listening or easy books, wanikani or anki, and give it a shot for a few weeks! you’ll know pretty quick if it works for you.

   as an example, i started by trying the genki books, but i found that early on i was getting mega stressed about kanji. i think this is a common experience, since there’s constantly posts here like “can you get fluent without learning kanji???” so i decided to study exclusively kanji for a while.

   from september 2021 until like may of this year i used wanikani, only doing around 30 minutes a day. there’s tons of anki decks shared around here that would do the same thing. i think that i probably spent too long doing just kanji, and also fell off for like a month in there, but now i feel a lot more confident as i’ve gotten into proper grammar and listening work.

3. Both.

   Find which one you struggle with more and give that more emphasis.

   Kana represents like .00000000001% of the time and effort you’ll put into learning Japanese. You can’t afford to neglect either of the actual cores of language.

4. I think first some vocab (kana) and basic grammar, after that it would be good idea progressively learning basic kanji and using it for replacing kana, little by little.