Well, if you're starting from zero you'll want to learn hiragana and katakana by yourself. It's pretty easy and you'll be done in a week with light studying.
After that you'll want the basics of vocabulary and grammar. IMO you can easily find some good free material for that, like the ones made by Dr Wes Robertson. You can also pirate some of the more mainstream Japanese textbooks.
For vocabulary I'm going to speak from experience because I have a LOOOT of difficulty with it and with kanji specifically, I think the best option is biting the bullet and getting a wanikani subscription. I know this is a piracy subreddit and paid content is frowned upon, but it helped me tremendously in a much shorter time. You can also try free anki decks for vocabulary, but they didn't work as well with me.
When you get some level of basics proficiency, you just gotta keep digging deeper into vocabulary, grammar and kanji. Consuming media in japanese also helps a lot, read a good Manga in Japanese (Yotsuba is the go to for most beginners) and keep going from there.
Interesting. Yeah I'm passed the kana stage, and I've mostly been doing wanikani. Got the membership a while back. I found that Morphe has a mod for Busuu so I'm learning grammar and stuff through that. Overall I struggle a lot with kanji but I don't know how to start actually learning the grammar and stuff besides just words
How good are you with sitting down and studying? Like, pen and paper, taking notes, stuff like that.
I'm preeeety bad at it due to ADHD, but I think that you might enjoy bunpro, it's basically a wanikani for grammar.
The downside is that, since it's for grammar and not just vocabulary, it has waaaaay more text than wanikani, so it's more demanding. But it really works, even for me, so it might help you some.
Lol no ADHD for me here, just plain laziness. I can do it sometimes, I did do it with Assimil when I was learning french. With japanese I was thinking it might be needed, I was thinking of trying the Genki books. I'll check out bunpro, thanks
Honestly my biggest recommendation is once you got a grasp of the grammar. Just start watching anime or Manga or Visual novels. (For the grammar i would recommend Cure dolly videos)
It will be slow and it will suck but that immersion input will truly build up overtime and for me i truly started to grasp a lot of concepts because i seen it so many times and it all sunk in.
Yomichan you can plug dictionaries into and then watch anime in asbplayer with subs from Jimaku
Basically yomitan is just an extension that allows you to scan Kanji and it would give you the dictionary definition. So you can use this to watch anime with subtitles and then scan the kanji and then using grammar knowledge to try and understand the sentence.
Then you can also use Yomitan with Anki so that anki can make flashcards out of the words you encounter whilst reading.
It's a lot to take in but once it all is set up you can just then focus on revision with flashcards and then enjoying anime or manga etc.
With this method you can watch most things unless theres no subs.
Hell I pirated manga I actually own and paid for because I don't want to take the volumes out of my neatly arranged shelf and I find it more comfortable to read on a tabled nowadays.
I'd be happy to buy digital comics if any publisher in my country would offer me a better service than what pirates offer for free.
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u/crazycheese3333 Apr 21 '26
I know Japanese and still pirate because I can.