Looking for advice on any key tools for learning

Apologies this is slightly off topic from skritter itself. Been learning Chinese for a while now and just started learning Japanese. I’d like to make my learning as efficient as possible from the get go so looking for advice on the best tools you guys use for learning Japanese.

For reference, for my Chinese, Skritter, Pleco, Anki, and Chinese Pod are my staples. I guess I’m looking for the Japanese equivalents. I use Skritter and Anki for Japanese already so I guess I’m looking for the best dictionary and listening resources. Thanks!

If you’re looking to build listening comprehension, there are some really good tactics

I would look into the program “subs2srs” for Anki, which builds an Anki deck based off a subtitle and video file. Depending on your level (if your reading ability is much higher than your listening ability), I would look for things that have both English and Japanese subs, so both fields could be included in the deck. If you’re already at a high reading level, it would be better to use just the Japanese subtitles since you’re only testing your listening comprehension.

The program will generate one card per subtitle line. The card comes up as audio only, or audio and a still image of that part in the video, and you click to reveal the subtitle answer(s). It’s extremely powerful to test your listening comprehension and is also a lot of fun since you can grab videos you’re actually interested in (assuming a subtitle file is available).

Another powerful tactic is 書き取り, writing down what you hear from an audio source. Ideally you would want the transcription already available so you can check yourself later (so you could do this on a subs2srs deck, if you choose to write down the answer on paper first before checking, instead of just going on your ears alone). You also could just use a video that has subtitles, disable the subtitles, and play the video, pause it, and write down what you heard. If you use something like VLC, you can tap the back arrow on your keyboard to back up a few seconds, which might be needed since you may have to relisten and relisten.

Another dictation method is to take hiragana only text, and then write down the sentence as it’d actually be written, but that doesn’t really help with listening comprehension.

Here’s a post which goes over some of this:

If I think of any other methods for boosting listening comprehension I’ll post them here!