There’s quite a lot to do, and I don’t exactly have a grasp of where I should begin.
All help is appreciated!
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How are you currently studying grammar? Any grammar course worth their salt should be introducing them to you as you go along
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I haven’t started studying grammar yet. I’m following the guide for learning Japanese on Tofugu.
I’m just grinding WaniKani.
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It’s pretty universally accepted on here that there’s no reason to wait on studying grammar. Once you begin there, you’ll start to get introduced to the particles
They usually come up pretty quickly too
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Alright then, I’ll take your advice and start from now. Thanks for the help!
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Tofugu’s guide is great, especially when you’re just starting out. I used it myself when I got started, but regarding the grammar, I agree with Pembo (and pretty much everyone else in the forum): Starting it earlier doesn’t hurt at all. After all, it is necessary to use the language 
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While I know that it is quite popular on the forums here to ignore the Tofugu guide in regards to grammar without a second thought, I think it’s worth pointing out that I disagree with the notion that it is just bad advice in all cases. In my opinion, there is a tradeoff involved that each person must consider.
In my case, I didn’t bother waiting and it is definitely true that I had to spend a lot of time learning a bunch of vocab in order to be able to understand the grammar points well.
Had I waited, I would have been able to get through those things much faster and with less effort than I was able to without waiting. I can confidently say that because I noticed the Tango vocab books that use i+1 sentences got significantly easier over time as I learned the grammar so the sentences actually made sense and similarly, as mentioned, I needed to learn a bunch of vocab to really understand the grammar. So there was a bit of a symbiotic relationship going on there.
The Tofugu guide is absolutely correct about that.
In exchange for that additional struggle though, I was able to finish the Tango N5 book, all of the N5 grammar points, and a fair bit of the Tango N4 book as well as N4 grammar before ever reaching level 10 though on WK.
Given that, it definitely would have taken longer overall had I waited since I’d would have just been starting them.
The main thing that really stood out to me is that it doubled up a lot of vocab since I ended up learning a bunch of vocab words via Anki from doing the grammar side and Tango books that show up here on WK eventually which feels a bit wasteful in terms of time. It does make it really easy for those words on WK though because I already know them which probably makes up for it to some degree.
So, all in all, I don’t think it matters too much in the grand scheme of it all. What’s a few weeks in an overall journey that will realistically take years? Is it worth it to you personally to end up doubling some of your work, and struggling more early on in exchange for learning some grammar and potentially starting immersion a few weeks earlier? That’s likely to be different for each person.
I agree in general with the other suggestions in this thread about grammar resources (personally I think a good textbook is a pretty tried and tested way to learn grammar , and it doesn’t assume you’ve already learned a whole pile of kanji before you start). I would suggest an approach that looks more like “learn some sentence patterns” than “learn particles” – obviously the sentence patterns will use the particles, but I think it works better to effectively be grappling with the different uses of each particle one at a time, rather than studying all the different ways に can be used at the same time.
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You could use a textbook (I use Genki), and once you have learned a new particle, you can add it on Bunpro to consolidate your learning
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