I have already learned hiragana and katakana. Now I’m stuck. I don’t know if I should start learning vocabulary, grammar, sentance structure, or kanji. Should I learn both readings of a word, even if one of the readings is rarely ever used and not relavent to my learning? How do I find out which readings are most used? Are some used 50/50? So many questions! Any advice on where to go from here would be greately appreciated!
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For reference, I plan on traveling solo to Japan in September, so I’d like to get by speaking to restaurant workers, cashiers, etc. I’d also like to be able to read most of what I come across without using google translate. Is this realistic?
Learning japanese to a survival level is very similar to N5. With this level of knowledge you will be able to order at restaurants, ask for directions, express basic concepts, and travel around. You’ll also want to learn to read a bit because menus and train stations and stuff. The main app I suggest for this is Anki which is a smart flash card app that you can make or load any flashcard deck you like into it. Anki is smart enough to show you cards at a rate needed for you to memorize them based on your own answers.
Now that you have learned hiragana and katakana you should move on to vocab and grammar.
I am a big fan of the Tango Anki decks starting with Tango N5 for vocabulary. They are set up in an i +1/1t format which means they teach you with sentences but every sentence only has 1 new word. That way you see the words and grammar you have learned over and over in a natural way. This deck also contains a lot of words important for travel, ordering food, shopping and more. They also have audio which will help for your travels.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/866090213
Grammar you could use an app like Bunpro which is not free but I think is great, or YouTube videos like the series from Tokini Andy or Cure Dolly on YouTube.
When it comes to starting japanese I pretty much agree with everything in this video except I prefer the free Migaku Kanji God addon Anki addon over RTK. The addon creates RTK style cards which are based on the kanji coming up in your Anki decks.
https://youtu.be/L1NQoQivkIY
So some quick math.
800 – 1000 vocab words / 4 months (120 days) = 8.3 new words a day.
80 ish Grammar / 4 months (120 days) = about 1 grammar point every day. I would continue past N5 grammar though.
80 ish kanji / 4 months (120 days) = about 1 kanji every day. Could find some food and travel based ones to learn too.
I’d highly recommend you learn grammar first, as it helps you understand kanji readings and sentence structure. Even if you see big scary kanji you’ll have critical information such as whether it’s a noun, verb, adjective, etc. and which readings to use. Kunyomi readings will be easy to identify as long as you associate the kunyomi stems with the following kana. Onyomi is a bit harder if there are multiple readings, you’d need to brute force memorize which readings go with other kanji, though most only have one onyomi reading frequently used. Lastly, differentiating between using onyomi and kunyomi is easy due to the Kanji following a grammar rule where you can easily tell, and this rarely fails. If you don’t understand what I just said, no problem as thats for later, all I’m doing is listing all the reasons why I think grammar first is the most important foundation.
Read this: https://learnjapanese.moe/
Then follow the 30 day guide here: https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/