Hello! This is my first ever post after my first ever day of starting WaniKani (and to top it off, my first ever post on any forum! I was reading through and loved the community feel you guys have!). I’m a complete beginner in Japanese and have hopes of doing a study abroad next Spring (fingers crossed on getting accepted) which would start in April (around 7 months from now). I have only reached the stage of knowing hiragana and katakana, yes, I know, a TRUE beginner. This is my first attempt at learning a new language, other than learning Spanish in high school if you can even call that learning… My plans for now are to do as much with WK reviews as I can but I am a bit unsure of what else I should be doing. For the first few weeks will WK be enough learning until I can supplement some other resources for extra practice or does anyone have any recommendations?
My honest goal is to be able to at least understand basic Japanese and be able to get around somewhat smoothly if I do go there, but I am worried that if I try and go too fast, I may burn out. I am obsessed with the idea of learning right now, so I would love any recommendations!
Also, probably the most important question I almost forgot… With the amount of time I have, what is a realistic goal or level I should strive to get? I like setting goals for motivation, but I don’t want to overshoot it and be discouraged. For those of you that are pretty far along, is being somewhat conversational at the most basic levels in 7 months too far-fetched?
I would love to hear any advice or from others on the same journey and what they are doing too.
Welcome to the forum (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
How much time do you have available to study every day? There’s definitely a lot you can do in seven months. The most important thing I can recommend is starting a grammar source asap. Since English is your native and only language, Japanese grammar and sentence structure are going to be a beast. Genki 1 is designed to take 100 hours, so if you do half an hour per day you can finish just in time.
Starting simple reading and listening quickly is also a good idea. For reading there’s the absolute beginner book club, and for listening there’s Comprehensible Japanese on Youtube.
As for WK, you don’t really need to go super fast. Level 10-15 sounds like a good level to shoot for. By level 10 you’ll know all the kanji that a Japanese first grader knows, and by level 15 you’ll know 80% from third grade and 50% from fourth grade:
For an in depth guide, you might be interested in this post.
Welcome to the community!! It’s lovely to have you. Getting to study in Japan would be so exciting!
Admittedly I’m still relatively new myself, but figured I could at least offer some advice from the perspective of someone who’s making headway towards a similar goal to you (N5) in a similar timeframe. I’m sure you’ll get a lot more advice from more experienced users, but as I’m not yet at the stage where I can attempt reading (and I imagine you’re in the same boat), I thought I would suggest what’s been working for me so far via ‘brute force’ learning alone:
- WaniKani
- Bunpro
- MaruMori
- KaniWani
Aside from KaniWani, the other 3 tools all offer to teach you more than one thing. WaniKani teaches kanji and vocab, Bunpro teaches both vocab and grammar, and MaruMori is a combination of the 3. KaniWani I’ll get into in a bit.
The reason I use 3 different tools for largely the same thing is because I’ve been using them mainly for the things (I believe) they’re strongest at. In more detail:
WaniKani:
I started out using WK alone up until about level 4. While WK does teach you vocabulary, it’s important to note that it doesn’t teach you kanji by the complexity of its meaning (the way Japanese children are taught). Rather, it teaches you by the complexity of the kanji itself (as this is more time efficient). As you go along, you’ll unlock vocab relating to the kanji you’ve learned. This can be great for things like numbers early on, but you’ll probably soon start to wonder why you’re being taught the word for ‘moon viewing’ before something much more useful like say, ‘orange’ or ‘hat’.
While WK does include a few kana-only vocab words, the vast majority include kanji and may not be the most useful to you at your current stage. Personally, I still complete the vocab on WK (and have come across a few of these words in the wild) though I decided to take vocab into my own hands recently. This brings me to:
Bunpro:
Bunpro offers both grammar and vocab in an SRS system similar to WaniKani. Unlike WK, I’d say both the grammar and vocab tools on Bunpro are equally as great. That being said, so far I’ve only been using it for vocab (specifically the N5 deck). I’ve only been doing 5 words a day and I’m due to finish the deck (1100 words) around the middle of next year when the N5 exam is. You could opt to do the same with a slightly higher daily word count and you’d easily finish it before your exchange begins! I really like how each word is offered in a variety of context sentences even in reviews, so while it may stump you in the beginning I believe it’s beneficial in the long run.
Bunpro does offer grammar too, and (as @hotdogsuplex suggested) you should probably get started on learning some as soon as you can because it’s so important for learning to understand and construct sentences. There are many tools for this such as the Genki textbooks (a popular choice, and suggested above), Bunpro, MaruMori, various Youtube series, etc. I haven’t been using Bunpro for grammar for a few reasons, but the main one is it’s a personal choice for me to ‘separate’ my learning between platforms as it helps me better focus on each thing as I’m studying. I mentioned MaruMori, so …
MaruMori:
Probably the most unique thing on this list. MaruMori is a gamified version of learning Japanese and very fun to do. I did mention earlier that it’s designed to be an all-rounder and offers to teach you vocab, kanji and grammar, however I primarily use it for grammar. In my opinion, it teaches grammar and its nuances very well, and also uses an SRS system to enforce it. It’s also very satisfying to move your little character through each island. I don’t focus too much on the kanji or vocab to avoid burnout (and also because almost all words/kanji I come across I’ve already covered through WK and Bunpro), but I still go through it from time to time to pick up words I haven’t seen yet.
One thing I’d suggest is that if you do try MaruMori, start from the Isle of New Beginnings rather than Fledgling Forest. You did say you’d learned the kana but there’s still some very useful lessons in the pre-N5 island and some handy minigames for reinforcing the kana. If you know your stuff, you’ll blitz through it anyway and probably learn a few things along the way.
KaniWani:
I left this until last because this is specifically a tool I use in combination with WaniKani. As the name suggests KaniWani is the backwards version of WK - it syncs with your account and based on the vocab you’ve learned in WK, asks you to provide the Japanese word (in kana) for the English definition. While it’s got a few issues, I’d say this tool has been indispensable. Sometimes you don’t realise you don’t actually know a word until you’re forced to think of it without any kanji or kana to give you a hint. It follows the same SRS schedule and tiers as WK (I believe).
Other resources:
- ToKini Andy’s Genki I Youtube series (while I wouldn’t use this exclusively for grammar, it’s been a great resource to either get the hang of a concept or reinforce one I’ve already learned)
- This video explaining the way Japanese sentence structure works vs. English (I’m also a monolingual English speaker, this helped things click a lot for me)
- Ponto Nei’s gaming streams (if you’re into gaming/watching streams, Ponto Nei has been a great resource for just listening. I don’t understand much at all (and neither will you to start with), but it’s been great for listening practice and picking up the occasional word. It’s kept me engaged even if I don’t understand - though it has been very exciting when I realise I do understand!)
I think that’s pretty much it for now! I hope it’s helpful in getting you started. I will note as well, be careful of burnout. It’s easy to think it’ll never happen when you’re in the honeymoon stage and all you want to do is learn (and WaniKani is giving you so little to do), but things will likely get overwhelming quickly especially if you try to speed run it. It’ll also hurt your retention. If you find yourself forgetting a lot in your reviews or feeling overwhelmed, I’d suggest putting a hold on lessons for a few days (or however long) until you feel like you’re on top of things again.
Good luck! 
Thank you! I had actually planned on getting genki this month, forgot to mention that haha. I would say outside of WK review, I could get 1-3 hours in fairly comfortably a day. The book club sounds like a great idea, I will certainly check that out. I really appreciate the help, I will be looking into all of that asap. I think I will shoot for that level 15 range as a goal, sounds just like where I wanted to be for basic conversation 
Thanks again, hope to see you around soon!
Thank you for your comment and time! Hey, you may be newer but you’re pretty far ahead of me, so I am glad you responded and offered your knowledge. I just went ahead and bookmarked kaniwani, sounds very useful. The other 2 I certainly will be looking into later today, that sounds like a great well-rounded system you were able to keep as a fun process of learning! Just what I would need to keep me from a potential burnout stage.
Thank you again for your time on this post, I am already more than excited to look into these resources when I get home today. I hope you and I can stay consistent for the next few months, and fingers crossed (not really, it seems like you have it all together lol) you have that n5 test in the bag!
No worries at all! I hope you find some of the tools are useful for you. It took me about 7 months to figure out this was what worked for me, and that was after trying several other options for learning. All that is to say, don’t be hard on yourself if you find yourself trying lots of different things or switching between learning methods as you go along. What matters is that they work for you
Thank you, and best of luck with your studies! Though I will admit, this is my second attempt at WaniKani after getting burned out before finishing level 3 at the beginning of my Japanese journey - hence my warning about burnout 
. But so far so good on take 2. You seem very keen so I hope you’re able to achieve the level of Japanese you’re after!