Japanese Learning Resources

I am currently teaching myself Japanese. This page is a ruff outline of how I am doing that with more foundational material at the top.

Kana

The equivalent of the alphabet and the first thing you should learn. I learned both hiragana and katakana in a week studying on my lunch breaks. The mnemonics on this site where the only material I used.

Basic Grammar

While looking for introductions to grammar I came across a YouTube channel by one Cure Dolly. Cure Dolly explains grammar and structure in a way that made intuitive sense to me, and after about twenty videos I could make sense of most sentences that you would find in first and second grade children's books.

There are also two books by Cure Dolly, Unlocking Japanese, and Alice in Kanji Land. Unlocking Japanese is a little over one hundred pages and touches on some grammar and structure topics that can trip up native English speakers. It is definitely the stronger of the two books, and I would say it is mandatory reading. Alice in Kanji Land is almost entirely mnemonics for learning all of the JLPT N5 Kanji. While entertaining, few of the mnemonics really stuck with me and I learned most of those kanji from just reading and looking them up repeatedly.

Finally I got a copy of Genki 1, the standard collage level Japanese textbook. It's as good as any modern textbook, by which I mean it's not that good. I never really used it and wouldn't recommend it.

Reading

Once you get kana and the basic grammar down then you should jump into reading. There is a site called Tadoku that has tons of free graded readers. Start with the level 0 books, read them all, but don't take any of Tadoku's advice on reading. They will tell you to do dumb things like not to look up words you don't know and that if a book is difficult then you should quit reading it. Just do the opposite, look up EVERY word you don't know. It also helps to make a flash card of these words and go through them at least once a day. You can use Anki for this, but I always end up spending more time fighting with the system than studying, so I don't bother.

Listening

If you are learning Japanese you probably watch some anime. Keep doing that, but turn off the subtitles, at least some of the time. That way you can force your brain to start trying to understand spoken Japanese. This doesn't seem like it's working at first, but after a week or two you should notice that you are starting to understand a few sentences. The more you watch without subtitles the faster this will happen.

Regarding subtitles, some people will say you should watch things with Japanese subtitles so you can compare the spoken and written sentences. This is good if you can get Japanese subs easily. In my experience, most Japanese media I find does not include Japanese subtitles which means you will have to find them yourself and then add them yourself. This can be a real pain, and at this point I don't even bother.

One word of caution with this approach. If you only watch anime then you will eventually start to get the vocal patterns and intonation of an anime character , that is, you will start to talk like a teenage girl. If you are an adult man then you probably don't want that. Add in some samurai movies or some Toho monster movies into your rotation so you can hear how adult men speak.

Kanji

There doesn't seem to be a standard "low resistance" method of learning kanji. For now I will just list out any resouces I use. After I learn the joyo kanji and feel I can have an opinion on kanji learning methods I will just list out what worked for me.