I’ve been learning Japanese for a month now, and I don’t know how to keep going; Not in terms of motivation but in resources. Right now, I know hiragana, some kanji, numbers, greetings, etc. I have been using Duolingo and Busuu but as you probably know, they aren’t great. I don’t know what to use, and I just feel stuck. Does anyone have any recommendations?
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Traditionally, an Anki deck like a Core 2k is a good starting point. Though even a core 10k would be useful here. If you want to learn the Kanji first I would do something like Remember the Kanji, some people use Wanikani instead. Lots of sources are out there, but I would opt for free sources over paid ones. In terms of efficiency: Remember the Kanji, Core 10k or [https://www.jpdb.io/](https://www.jpdb.io/) would be good places to start.
I’m also beginning learning. I’ve looked at some app but i think JA Sensei has a lot more to offer. Just my opinion.
After you learn some grammar jump into reading whatever you like.
To learn grammar pick one (just one) of these:
* Tae Kim’s guide (a free website which is basically a textbook in website form)
* Genki (a paper textbook you buy on amazon)
Honestly, nothing beats reading the textbooks and writing down Japanese for practice.
Here’s what I [recommend](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
You can read and learn grammar if you want. But I’d recommend starting reading asap
Make a list of things you want to do using Japanese and ask these questions:
– can I do these things badly but still get learning value despite my lack of skill?
– what tasks can I do that are stepping-stones towards these goals?
For example, if you want to take bicycle trips across Japan like Cris Broad does, you might turn the difficulty all the way down to:
– Can I find a bicycle-safety or bicycle-repair video for kids and understand a few new words here?
Even that is *scary difficult* for a complete beginner but it’s also within grasp. You could go from absolute zero to that goal within a few months at most. And, once you do that, then other goals of similar difficulty will be much easier.
Also, it gives you specific things to ask for help with. Not “can you review all language-learning apps?” – it’s “can you help me find this kind of content?” And, sure [I can](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y-SFcAZm-k)
Any kind of canned course has the disadvantage of trying to teach you things that a teacher has guessed will be useful. This works best at the beginning, but even then it’s not great for motivation.
So for beginners, it’s a good strategy to balance canned content with trying to explore independently. Before long you can shift the balance more towards independence.
Sticking with my example for now, how is it possible to recognize a few words or new words from that video? Well, like a *lot* of Japanese videos, it puts words on screen for emphasis.
So you can try using OCR (which is popular with beginners these days – I never used it and don’t have it set up) or you can go to http://jisho.org and use the multi-radical lookup for kanji you aren’t familiar with.
It also has auto-captions. YouTube autocaptions kinda suck. A *lot.* But it’s possible to copy-paste from them, which speeds things up. Because there are a lot of errors I wouldn’t recommend copying an entire sentence.
Single words though? Yes! Does a word make sense there? Now you have words that you might want to make vocabulary cards from, like 自転車 or 交通ルール
A beginner textbook will probably teach you 自転車 and maybe 交通 if you’re lucky. But 交通ルール = “traffic rules?” Nah, nobody knew that you’re interested in that.
—
This is very much a high-level overview of how to teach the parts of a language you care about. There are also guides to the language-learning process like Refold and Moe Way, *but* while I think they give excellent practical advice they don’t help as much with motivation so I wanted to sketch out that.
I haven’t gotten to Kanji yet, still workin’ on Katakana, but I’ve been preppin’ for it by writing a transcript to an anime on Animelon. Basically, as I learn more Kanji, and recognize the sound of words better, I’ll be able to understand the anime better. The website has both English and Japanese, Hiragana and Kanji, subtitles. Eventually I plan on joining Discord and lookin’ for a channel with Japanese speakers to converse with.