HomeLearn Japaneseshould I start with genki 1? Just finished learning hiragana and katakana but still don’t know any vocabulary. Confused on where to start
Any books you guys can recommend for resources? Really wanting to get into JLPT n5 soon. I only know a few words but my goal is to know at least a couple hundred by the end of the month.
I would go with genki 1. You don’t need to know any vocabulary to start the book. The vocabulary you need to know is in the beginning of each chapter
Genki’s great and you can start there if you really want to, but I’d honestly just use the free resources as they’re just as good in my opinion and you wouldn’t have to pay a single cent.
While you’re doing those two things you want to be immersing yourself in native content, preferably something easy like a slice of life anime like “Non Non Biyori” for example, or something you’re familiar with. After you’ve finished Genki 1 or have had the basic grammar nailed down, the language learning loop will just boil down to just this:
Immerse in Japanese-> lookup up unknown words and grammar -> repeat until you’re comfortable -> raise the difficulty of content (you won’t be very competent if you just stick with the kiddy shows) -> repeat until you’re fluent.
There’s not much else to it than that honestly. As for Kanji, I wouldn’t sweat it too much, you could do RTK or KKLC to learn them individually, they’ll certainly help but they’re quite possibly the most boring thing you can do—that, or you just learn them through vocab which is what a lot of people are doing nowadays myself included. These served me well, as I’ve managed to read quite a bit of VN’s quite comfortably, even though I deem my vocabulary to be still quite lacking.
Just check out TheMoeWay or AJATT if you want to learn more. So yeah… good luck!
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I would go with genki 1. You don’t need to know any vocabulary to start the book. The vocabulary you need to know is in the beginning of each chapter
Genki’s great and you can start there if you really want to, but I’d honestly just use the free resources as they’re just as good in my opinion and you wouldn’t have to pay a single cent.
While you’re doing Genki or some other free resource, get yourself an Anki deck like [Tango N5](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pMlJvSrKQOSaiN8sPLdNDvWP31EClxDO/view) which will teach you the 1000 most common words in the language. Makes life a lot easier.
While you’re doing those two things you want to be immersing yourself in native content, preferably something easy like a slice of life anime like “Non Non Biyori” for example, or something you’re familiar with. After you’ve finished Genki 1 or have had the basic grammar nailed down, the language learning loop will just boil down to just this:
Immerse in Japanese-> lookup up unknown words and grammar -> repeat until you’re comfortable -> raise the difficulty of content (you won’t be very competent if you just stick with the kiddy shows) -> repeat until you’re fluent.
There’s not much else to it than that honestly. As for Kanji, I wouldn’t sweat it too much, you could do RTK or KKLC to learn them individually, they’ll certainly help but they’re quite possibly the most boring thing you can do—that, or you just learn them through vocab which is what a lot of people are doing nowadays myself included. These served me well, as I’ve managed to read quite a bit of VN’s quite comfortably, even though I deem my vocabulary to be still quite lacking.
Just check out TheMoeWay or AJATT if you want to learn more. So yeah… good luck!