Skritter fam, I’m starting to learn a little Japanese. Both because it has been on my to-do list for over a decade and because I think it’ll help me better understand how we can improve the Japanese experience. 一石二鳥
Question is, what kinda resources would you recommend to a total 新参者?
Learn all 2,136 常用漢字 only as out of context individual characters (don’t forget to memorize all of the possible readings too) and watch 2,136 hours of Attack on Titan (up to 1/3 of these hours can be substituted with Ghost in the Shell or Naruto). This is the way.
But on a serious note, I found digging into the basics of grammar useful when I first started, just to get my bearings since Japanese is structured quite differently from English. Particles + adjective and verb conjugations + no spaces made reading anything super laborious for me. I barely knew what even constituted a word to look up in a dictionary, and pop-up dictionaries rarely have enough context to definitively say what a particle or random string of kana means. I originally tried just forcing my way through a physical version of Shirokuma Cafe as my very first “textbook” after learning the kana, but quickly gave up and went to more traditional resources. Luckily, there’s some really great Youtube channels nowadays that basically teach all the grammar in the Genki textbooks.
ToKini Andy is a great Japanese teacher on youtube. He also goes into some more intermediate material in other videos:
Once you feel ready to start reading things, https://www.satorireader.com/ is a great resource with lots of good sentences with translations, contextual notes, and audio.
And of course in this digital age, a pop-up dictionary is always helpful. Rikaikun (Chrome) is probably the closest extension to something like the Zhongwen or Zhongzhong dictionaries on the Chinese side. But I prefer to use Yomichan (Chrome, Firefox). It requires a little initial setup, but it is more customizable.