The problem with learning Japanese is that there's little consensus on how to learn, there's no single stand-out resource that you can use and make balanced headway in every area, and different styles seem to work for different people. I don't claim to be an expert in Japanese pedagogy by any means, but I thought that I'd list what's been helpful for me so far, in rough order of decreasing usefulness:
1. Anki
Almost every learning method assumes some sort of flashcards, because unlike learning another Indo-European language that has some similarity crutches that can be leveraged to limit the amount of completely new material, it's nearly impossible to learn Japanese without forcefully drilling loads of new information gradually into memory. Anki is a multi-platform spaced repetition system (SRS) flashcard application. The Windows version is free, while the iPhone app costs $24.99. I have both because they can sync updates to each other through the central Ankiweb site, and it's useful to pull out my phone and review vocabulary while I'm waiting in line, etc.
There are pre-made flashcard decks available, but I would recommend that you build up your own gradually, as you encounter more vocabulary.
The Japan Times publishes this textbook (and accompanying workbook, which is important for practice). The included CDs are especially helpful (and challenging, due to the speed) for listening comprehension and shadowing, if you pay close attention to the way the dialogue is actually said. I've found the material to be generally balanced, although the kanji and writing components seem to be a bit of an afterthought rather than truly integrated into the rest of the course. There are a couple of quirks that I don't particularly like, and it does take some unwritten steps to make the most of this book for self-study, but this is probably the best place to start with grammar. I'll probably review this in more detail once I finish it.
3. Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course
This is probably the best comprehensive book for learning kanji, covering 2,300 of them, including all 2,136 official-use (Jouyou) kanji. This is a significant difference from books that stop at a few hundred, because there are a lot of crazy kanji beyond that point. The method in the book recognizes common subcomponents (graphemes) of kanji, but unlike some other approaches, does not force you to learn them before learning a kanji that uses them. This allows the book to introduce fairly complicated but common kanji (e.g., 曜) early on, increasing the early usefulness of the book, and represents an attempt at compromise between methods that focus on simpler (but less common) kanji first and ones that present a bunch of random useful kanji without considering their components.
In my mind, the other big advantage of the book is that it presents a handful of vocabulary terms and compounds for each kanji. Learning the possible readings for a kanji in isolation is, for me, like trying to memorize all of the ways that the group of letters ough can be pronounced in English. It's not very useful without context. It's easier to remember that 日曜日 is にちようび (= nichiyoubi) rather than that 日 can be にち (nichi), び (bi), ひ (hi), か (ka), じつ (jitsu), and a few other fun irregular readings in compounds.
This book does assume knowledge of hiragana and katakana, and some of the idiomatic vocabulary expressions use basic particles, so knowing those helps.
4. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
This is a nice supplement to the grammar covered in Genki, covering the exact parameters and nuances of when certain constructs can and cannot be used, and the logic behind those rules. There are a lot of entries that go over my head still, but the entries that I have understood are clear. Possibly the best example of grammatical logic explanation is that に (ni) denotes a point of contact, which explains its seemingly various uses to mark indirect objects, destinations, location of existence, etc.
5. Wiktionary
This one may surprise you, but Wikipedia's sister site is surprisingly helpful as a first pass for looking up common Japanese words and kanji. Often, there's cross-referencing for alternate forms of the kanji, a list of common compounds with irregular readings, and the proper Tokyo pitch accent. A lot of this information is available elsewhere, but in separate locations. A single source helps greatly. I'm sure that I'll outgrow Wiktionary's Japanese coverage at some point, but for now it's been extremely useful to me.
So, that's what's working so far for me. Keep in mind that I'm one person with certain goals (e.g., reading is important to me, and I have a time limit, but don't want a "shortcut" that becomes less useful in the long-term). There are other resources that I use that didn't make this list, and yet may be better for others. I may cover those in a later post.
3. Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course
This is probably the best comprehensive book for learning kanji, covering 2,300 of them, including all 2,136 official-use (Jouyou) kanji. This is a significant difference from books that stop at a few hundred, because there are a lot of crazy kanji beyond that point. The method in the book recognizes common subcomponents (graphemes) of kanji, but unlike some other approaches, does not force you to learn them before learning a kanji that uses them. This allows the book to introduce fairly complicated but common kanji (e.g., 曜) early on, increasing the early usefulness of the book, and represents an attempt at compromise between methods that focus on simpler (but less common) kanji first and ones that present a bunch of random useful kanji without considering their components.
In my mind, the other big advantage of the book is that it presents a handful of vocabulary terms and compounds for each kanji. Learning the possible readings for a kanji in isolation is, for me, like trying to memorize all of the ways that the group of letters ough can be pronounced in English. It's not very useful without context. It's easier to remember that 日曜日 is にちようび (= nichiyoubi) rather than that 日 can be にち (nichi), び (bi), ひ (hi), か (ka), じつ (jitsu), and a few other fun irregular readings in compounds.
This book does assume knowledge of hiragana and katakana, and some of the idiomatic vocabulary expressions use basic particles, so knowing those helps.
4. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
This is a nice supplement to the grammar covered in Genki, covering the exact parameters and nuances of when certain constructs can and cannot be used, and the logic behind those rules. There are a lot of entries that go over my head still, but the entries that I have understood are clear. Possibly the best example of grammatical logic explanation is that に (ni) denotes a point of contact, which explains its seemingly various uses to mark indirect objects, destinations, location of existence, etc.
5. Wiktionary
This one may surprise you, but Wikipedia's sister site is surprisingly helpful as a first pass for looking up common Japanese words and kanji. Often, there's cross-referencing for alternate forms of the kanji, a list of common compounds with irregular readings, and the proper Tokyo pitch accent. A lot of this information is available elsewhere, but in separate locations. A single source helps greatly. I'm sure that I'll outgrow Wiktionary's Japanese coverage at some point, but for now it's been extremely useful to me.
So, that's what's working so far for me. Keep in mind that I'm one person with certain goals (e.g., reading is important to me, and I have a time limit, but don't want a "shortcut" that becomes less useful in the long-term). There are other resources that I use that didn't make this list, and yet may be better for others. I may cover those in a later post.
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