I will layout resources in chronological order that I use them/ plan to use & how you should approximately too.
Note: this page may update in the future, and the resources within may also change.
1. Tofugu’s memorizing characters guide.
Tofugu has some great resources available for learning Japanese in general. But, I recommend as the starter to use their Ultimate characters guides.
If you didn’t know, there are 3 writing systems in Japan:
- Hiragana: used for native words
- Katakana: uses for using foreign words
- Kanji: Chinese characters borrowed to turn words into single characters.
You need hiragana as the base, katakana builds on top of it and kanji turns those words into characters. Furigana is Hiragana placed next to Kanji to know how to spell it or for children who are still learning.
Use the kana quiz to practice what you learn, do it whenever you have time to drill those characters into your head.
I personally think Kanji should come at the very end once you have mastered a nice amount of vocab. Some people say you can even get by without learning it outright, but if you are planning to travel to Japan, specially for work, you should learn some Kanji later.
1.1 Bonus: Tofugu’s 100 important words
- 100 words This is great if you are planning to travel to japan. I haven’t read the whole thing myself. You could maybe read this before you learn characters if you yearn for learning some vocab.
2. Anki (Flashcards)
Rather than using a Green Bird’s gameified, surface level learning app. You should use a Flashcard based system, it helps with better retention of vocab and it helps in pushing vocab into long term memory. I recommend watching the YouTube video by Trenton, as it goes in depth into why use this system, how to setup (specifically for this) and ways to sustain your learning.
Anki is the most well know application using a spaced repetion algorithm. If you can’t download a desktop app you can use ankiweb and add the Japanese deck by using shared deck option. You can also download ‘anki droid’ on android, or ‘ankimobile’ on ios for offline experience and sync with the desktop app using ankiweb. Or use ankiweb on mobile.
I use the Kaishi 1.5k deck as it is a well made vocab deck with sounds, images and example sentences. By default the front of the card in Kanji (if available), so you can also learn Kanji from here, I have modified my deck to show Furigana to speed up my learning but loose out on Kanji learning. There also the well known Core 2k/6k. I personally haven’t used it, but have heard good things from other.
I would also recommend looking at Trenton’s channel for tips on learning Japanese.
3. jisho.org
A Japanese dictionary. Gets the job done for Japanese to English & vice versa.
4. WaniKani
A great place to get started learning Kanji for those who has got some vocab under their belt. There is a free tier with 2000 characters. I am yet to use this.
5. Immersion
If you have watched enough videos explaining this, you will probably know what I am saying. Watching some simple Anime or listening to Japanese Music will probably help you pick up on words you are learning and add context to them and, even help with your pronunciation.
That’s it for now, will update this in the future.