There’s also this list:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/The-What-Do-I-Do-Now-Thread-Free-Resource-List/6534
Everything listed is free. Only free resources inside! (It’s a shorter list.)
I started learning from a friend from Japan.
I answered that in more depth in another thread, wish I knew where it was so I could link you. I’m not conversationally fluent, that’s for sure. I’m able to read a reasonable amount of NHK News Easy articles, and can understand most of a (children’s) manga “Yotsubato!” at this point, and converse mostly okay (with fairly simple sentences) over HelloTalk in Japanese (I’m talking about reading and writing). As far as speaking goes, I basically don’t - I haven’t done any language exchange, but I’ll shout out random things myself at home. If it comes out of nowhere (it sometimes does!) I’ll double-check the meaning, and my random intuition has always been right or close to right on this so far (one day, I can’t remember what I was thinking about, but I suddenly shouted “やっぱり!” in the bathroom). So I think on some very basic level, I’m beginning to think in Japanese. I’ve been watching a lot of things with subtitles for the last 17-18 years, however - so that’s a lot of listening practice and some shadowing practice. But even while I recognize the sounds and feel of the words, because I’ve only been seriously studying for the last year and a half (minus 6-7 months), my vocabulary and grammar comprehension is still fairly low. I’ll look for that other thread because there were a lot of other interesting answers in there (not only mine) tomorrow.
Welcome to WaniKani, and best of luck with your studies!
EDIT: This wasn’t the link I was looking for, however it is a very interesting discussion (that goes off-topic for a bit, and I’m partly to blame for that)… Have you been thinking in Japanese?