Loving it so far

[praget]

Hello everyone

i just start on wanikani in june because i broke my hand and i had a lot of free time at the moment, now i am at level 5 and i love it, i can say mi higarana is more than good but my katakana and kanji not so great but now i dont know where to go to start learning grammar o what are the next steps in this journey.

[orphen]

I hope your hand healed up nicely!

If you want to start learning grammar, there are a good number of resources. I enjoy Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese. It’s free, and I appreciate the mentality Kim approaches Japanese grammar with. I also have experience with the Genki textbooks. Their teaching style is different that Kim’s, but they are effective in their own way. Many others use Bunpro and enjoy it. I don’t have experience with it and so can’t speak to it much.

Your good hiragana will help you get started smoothly with Tae Kim or Genki. There are Genki reading groups on the forum, too. They’ve already started reading through the chapters, but anyone is always welcome, at any stage.

Keep it up!

[Omun]

Hello hello, welcome! Nice to hear you’re enjoying the process!

I tried a few grammar resources, including Tae Kim and Minna No Nihongo, but really didn’t click with them.

The teaching methods of the youtube channel KawaJapa CureDolly made all the difference in my ability to understand the crucial foundations of Japanese grammar.

Then I moved on to BunPro, and that got me farther along than I honestly ever thought I’d get. ^^

Good luck finding something that suits you!

[cehrlich]

Beginner here (especially on Wanikani) so take this for what it’s worth.

I started out with the Michel Thomas CDs as I got them from a friend. I’ve not heard anyone online talk about them but they worked for me. It’s an interesting way to learn basic grammar as there’s no reading and writing at all. I’d say they cover maybe half or 2/3 of what’s in Genki 1. The main downsides I found is that they teach only ます conjugations and have a strange approach to teaching て form.

I used them alongside a self made Anki deck that had the vocab from the CDs as well as a card for each grammar structure, and a few example sentence cards for each structure.

I then bought Genki 1 but the teaching style just didn’t click with me. Also I was frustrated that the vocab in the early chapters was mostly irrelevant to me. I’m now doing Human Japanese. I appreciate that it doesn’t have a lot of vocab so I can breeze through the chapters that overlap with what I already know. After all vocab is what Wanikani is for.

Next I’ll probably do Tae Kim. It seems very dense and daunting, but I’ve had the book laying around for a while now so might as well give it a go, to learn those advanced grammar structures.

What also helped a lot is speaking with my wife, as talking to her family is the reason I’m learning Japanese in the first place. Obviously not everyone has a Japanese speaking partner who you can annoy by constantly spewing broken Japanese at them, but I’d suggest looking into one of the online services that offer speaking to people of other languages. Same with writing - no matter what grammar and vocab learning tool you’re using, producing a few original sentences of written Japanese every now and then makes a huge difference in my opinion. Especially when they’re not forced sentences relating to your last lesson, but actual conversation.

As for Katakana (and Hiragana), I just got them in by brute force. For reading I used this website whenever I had a few minutes of free time: https://realkana.com/ and for writing I just started writing the words and sentences on my Anki cards on a notepad during revision.

[anon9242278]