Hey all! I had mentioned this lightly in previous posts but I decided to post the official link in case it might be helpful for anyone here. Basically I’m at about 3.5 years of trying to teach myself Japanese, and since I’m a horrendous learner, I’ve gone through a lot of text books and resources to get a better grasp on the various aspects of the Japanese language. I still have a super long way to go, but as I’ve made my way through these resources I’ve been writing my opinions on them based on how difficult they were to figure out, what they were effective in, and more.
I am in no way an expert in Japanese… I am probably somewhere between N5 and N4 level of proficiency… but if my experiences can help encourage anyone who is starting out, or save them a few bucks I’d love to help out!
This is a pretty good blog, but I’m not sure I could call it comprehensive until you can add the Genki textbooks (which it seems like you plan to?) since those are probably the king of beginner resources compared to most of the one’s you’ve listed.
Genki is definitely on my list to be reviewed, I just wanted to wait until I finish a few more chapters before I review it. Oddly enough I hadn’t heard of Genki until I tried a free tutoring session with someone from Japan. It definitely is a great series though also has a steeper learning curve than some of the other books I’ve read. (Not quite as steep as Tae Kim’s grammar guide but still steep.) That being said I am really enjoying it so far. It’s really filling in a lot of cracks that other textbooks didn’t. I can see why it’s so popular
Yeah I feel that Tae Kim doesn’t spend as much time on things as it should, and sometimes the order it teaches you things can be a bit odd, like waiting a lot of lessons before introducing polite tenses after casual tenses, which make up more of what you’d probably actually want to say to real life Japanese people.
