For vocab I would place seemingly useful words into an srs system called houhou. For grammar I dont think I really did much of anything and would rely on seeing it a lot.
Hoshiori was tough, but it had some good points. In general, I recommend starting off with standard school life stuff. Science fiction can be tough and sorta go a lot of ways, but there is a lot of material focused around everyday life stuff that will be very straightforward and use very similar vocab. Its definitely very possible to start with science fiction and in the end you’ll be fine, itll just be a bit tougher.
I also recommending finding a long visual novel if possible. This may seem weird because as a beginner, usually you just want to get through something small, right? Well, the vocabulary and writing style varies a lot depending on what you read, even if theyre about the same thing. Thats just how writers are. The more you read something, the better you’ll get at reading that and youll give yourself more time to fully become familiar with that writing style and common vocab used.
Ultimately its hard to give suggestions because the most important thing honestly is you read what you like. I speak from experience, you’ll be banging you head against the wall. It helps to keep you going if its all for something you want to read. So with that being said, heres the list I used a year and a half ago to find visual novels! Take a look and see if theres anything you like.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KnyyDt7jimEz-dgeMSKymRaT2r3QKBPm9AzqZ6oUWAs/pub
I think you can do it. I dont mean to sound like some motivational speaker, but you can really do a lot more than you would probably think. There are some really high level stuff that you wouldnt be able to understand with google and any reasonable amount of time, but so long as you are able to figure out what the sentence means without taking too long, its not too hard. No matter how much grammar or words you have to look up. Using a text hooker will make looking up words take 1-2 seconds, so it wont drain your time. You just gotta get good at knowing what to google to find the right grammar points, but even the text parser helps with this. If you see 逃げようとする, the definition of とする will tell you specifically that when its following a verb in volitional, it means “to attempt/try to (verb)” and hovering over 逃げよう will tell you its 逃げる in volitional form.
Vocab you can look up easily. Grammar sometime turned the meaning upside down if you don’t grasp it well. E.g., I recently misread a sentence as “I was kind to him sometime” instead of “He was kind sometime” because of a single letter に (a particle). Knowing the meaning of each word in a string of words does not mean you know the meaning of the sentence. Try deciphering this for example (an actual sample from a book we’re doing in a reading club – with the vocab translated to english):
