Once upon a time there was a usual guy sitting at home. Since he had nothing to do, he was thinking of what he could try out so that he wouldn't be bored. He randomly thought of learning Japanese!
Of course, that guy was me! And actually I am glad that it was me, since now I know what I want to work as in my life. A translator! I was always good at physics and math, but it never gave me the satisfaction like learning English (yes, English is not my mother tongue). I had already done two years of French which were a chaos, but that's a different story, and I had German lessons at school although German wasn't very exciting for me at the time.
The first thing I did was grab a notebook and find a language learning site. I found one called "Duolingo". It's also available as an app. I quickly got addicted to learning Japanese . The site provided me with continuous testing and it involved sound tests as well. I did make my first mistakes too. I downloaded an app called "Jisho" and quickly wrote down loads of Japanese phrases and words. They sadly did not stick into my head so I don't recommend stuffing your head so heavily with grammar. At first the site really did seem very good and I would still recommend it to some, but after a while it got pretty boring.
Then I did a quick Google search for a different site and I came across "Tae Kim's guide to learning Japanese". I did some learning sessions with it and I already felt progress. I also found an app based on this site called "Obenkyo". This is the best app I have found for learning Japanese and I use it every day. I forgot to mention that as someone who doesn't want to spend money, I was interested only in apps that would be for free. "Duolingo" was free to a certain degree and "Obenkyo" is completely free. I was using "Obenkyo" and from it I learned the two phonetic alphabets: Hiragana and Katakana. It was very easy to test yourself in memorizing the symbols and the app even offered tests on stroke order. It has been very helpful to this day.
After a while, when I started to move into learning numbers and some Kanji (the third alphabet of Japanese), I felt a little bit restricted and sort of lonely (if that makes sense). I went and googled for another free Japanese learning site and I found one. It's called "Renshuu". I use it almost every day now since it has a pretty big community and there are TONS of materials for learning that come from different sources of which many are books specially made for learning Japanese. It does have a slight restriction on tests though. You need to pay for a premium version of your account to access other kinds of tests other than flashcard ones. On the "Renshuu" site you can also play games together with the community and the site has a news of their own and that helps a bit too.
https://www.duolingo.com/
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/
https://www.renshuu.org/
I have to say this though: "Thou shall not escape Kanji!" People think that it is possible to learn Japanese by learning some basic Kanji and the two phonetic alphabets, but from what I hear, that is not true!
To make less mistakes in my journey to being fluent in Japanese, I searched Youtube for some Japan related channels and i found some. "Abroad in Japan", "Rachel & Jun", "Texan in Tokyo", "Reina Scully" and "TheAnimeMan" were the first to catch my eye. I definitely recommend their stuff since it helps in learning the culture of Japan and shows you the beautiful places you can visit and delicious foods you can eat there! That's about it for what I, as still being a student of Japanese, did when I started out and I hope you will gain something from this too!
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STOPHey, good luck learning Japanese! I just made a similar post as well, about my attempt to learn Korean! I'd recommend spacing out (hit enter twice) your paragraphs a bit more so that they're easier to read, you can also use the number sign on your keyboard once to make a header, twice to make a subheader and three times to make a sub-sub-header! So things look more organized. You can also link stuff by putting the description in square brackets and then the link in parenthesis right after! Check out the Markdown guide when you're posting your next update!
Look forward to seeing more from you, and again, good luck!
Ashley
Thank you very much for the advice! I have also started learning Korean. I will definitely check out your stuff!
Be careful not to go too far too fast - for example you wouldn't try to learn 20 recipes at once and then cook them all in a row, all the food would turn out mediocre.
However, if you learned one recipe very well you could use the skills from the first recipe to learn the second - and both meals would turn out far, far better. A jack of all trades is a master of none, as they say. Thirst for knowledge should of course be encouraged, but beware of the burn out effect.
If you don't mind some swear words, my favorite Japanese teaching channel on youtube is Namasensei's lessons - google it. So, so vulgar, but so good and so funny.
Ok, thanks. The burnout thing is known to me and sometimes I need to switch up languages since my mind gets lazy after 3 hours of Japanese. I will check out the channel too.
Ah, too bad I did not find this on time. I blame @hisir for not letting me know you're on here. xD