I’ve found Bunpro to be very helpful for me in learning grammar, which is something Wanikani entirely omits to teach you. You’ll find some people say you should just learn that through immersion, but at least for me that seems rather painful. Textbooks like Genki or Minna No Nihongo are also useful for this. There’s also a few textbook study groups on this forum.
The next thing to think about is what your goals are:
- Since you’ve said reading is a goal, reading some beginner material is good. There’s a couple of sources from here like graded readers (material made for language learners that sticks to specific levels of skill, such as JLPT levels), or kids manga/books.
- For graded readers, the two I hear people have had success with are Satori and Tadoku, but I’ve never used either so can’t comment on them.
- For kids manga, this forum has an absolute beginners book club. The name is a little bit misleading I think, as it’s not really something for day 1 of Japanese learning, but more for the beginning of reading.
- You can probably start earlier than you think. There’s a wide range of opinions on this as to when to start from the AJATT people who think you should start reading right after learning kana, to people that think you need to finish something like Wanikani level 60 or Anki Core 6k first. I tend to lean towards starting early but not immediately, mostly because it’s worked for me. So I’d say a decent knowledge of N5 grammar (obtainable from doing like the first 7 sets of lessons on Bunpro, or a beginner textbook like Genki I or Minna no Nihongo 1) is the point where you should consider starting reading. We have the book clubs here which can help if you want to read along to something with people. There’s also this thread with more resources for the starting: Resources for Starting to Read Japanese Content
- For hearing Japanese (important if you want to get back into anime), there are a couple of options:
- Beginner podcasts like Japanese with Shun or Nihongo con Teppei where they’ll speak slowly and keep to basic language to get you into it.
- I’ve heard of some people also having success watching Anime with Japanese subs. English subs are generally too easy and your brain will skip over the Japanese audio if you don’t understand it while Japanese subs give you a resource to reaffirm your understanding without short circuiting your understanding of Japanese. (That said, I suspect if your Japanese reading gets too far ahead of your Japanese listening, they’ll have the same issue)
- If your goals include communicating with Japanese people via writing, a good initial starting place might be to try the sentence a day thread here. Beyond that, there are language discord servers like EJLX or 日本語と英語 you can try which usually have text channels for beginners to write Japanese. It can be a way to ease into producing Japanese, and if you intend to actually speak it, you can move onto voice chat there if you’re comfortable.
- If you want to speak Japanese, probably your best option is to find a native Japanese tutor on iTalki. Otherwise the aforementioned discord servers also have voice chats for beginners in Japanese.
At some point you’ll probably also want to think about what to do for vocab seperate to Wanikani itself. While some attempts have been made by the devs to change it in recent months, Wanikani is primarily a Kanji app. So there’s a lot of common terms that are kana only that aren’t included, or use very common kanji that aren’t included because Wanikani’s original design saw vocab as a way to reinforce kanji so stopped adding vocab terms for a kanji if they thought they had enough for that. Also Wanikani orders things by kanji complexity mostly, so there’s some very common terms that are pretty late in Wanikani.
There’s a few options for learning vocab not on Wanikani. I did a little comparison of the SRS options in my own study log a few months back, and then there’s also the option of doing a lot of immersion and reading to get vocab that way.