Really enjoying Japanese From Zero’s site as a beginner trying to learn solo

I’m just starting off for whatever this opinion is worth, but I did want to say that I’ve been really liking Japanese From Zero’s website course as a self-studier. Just off the bat, I’ve seen that the main criticism of the JFZ books are its “progressive kana” system where it splices romaji and kana together, but the site completely overhauled that by allowing you to fast-toggle between romaji, progressive, kana, and even kanji. This alleviates the awkwardness of the progressive system, but imo it’s also a fantastic learning tool, especially for me as a beginner, since it’s easy to toggle back and forth between the kana and the romaji if I was unsure about a pronunciation. Each word/phrase also comes with a hover-box that allows you to copy the text to your clipboard and also toggle between the different viewings, which makes making my own Anki cards a lot easier

All of the sentences are voiced, each with their own play button, so it’s also easy to get immediate feedback and even practice comprehension. I’d also bought Genki I and Beginner Tobira, and as someone who’s not in a classroom course, I found that getting this feedback (or even getting an answer sheet to check myself against) was kinda cumbersome. The audio files for Genki and Beginner Tobira are fine, but there is something to be said about not having to listen to answers in batches or not having to scrub through the mp3 to find the particular line you want

I will say that the content is noticeably slower than Genki. I’ve done JFZ’s Book 1 lessons 1-4, and that’s only equivalent to Lesson 1 of Genki. Whereas Genki has a paragraph and three lines on the use of ‘nの,’ JFZ has an entire lesson dedicated to that, which I can see as being frustrating if you are trying to blaze through this. I haven’t minded it really since I still found it helpful to practice all the lines, repetitive as they may be, and I figure that repetition is the point of language acquisition anyway

JFZ’s site is noticeably more expensive than just getting Genki or Tobira (it’s $13/mo), but I personally have found the convenience of it all to be well worth it. It’s self-contained so you don’t need the JFZ books (which are way overpriced imo… you’d have to pay $150-200 for a full set which sounds like it’s just equivalent to Genki I+II), and honestly, even the text on the website explains things well enough that I’ve only glanced at the videos in passing (videos are free on youtube too!). Anyway, free accounts get access to the first three lessons per book so you can always check it out to see if you like it or not

I know I’m really sounding like I’m shilling (I’m not, I swear!), but I’m just glad to find a way to study that works for me and wanted to share