I used to live in Japan for about 5 years, and while I was there most of the Japanese I learned was through my co-workers and family. I did study a little, but almost nobody around me spoke English so I mostly learned Japanese by just using it every day. As a result of this, I do know quite some Japanese but my grammar isn’t that great (I know little rules, just what word to use in which sentence if that makes sense).
We moved to my home country and I want to keep practicing Japanese, but I’m a little lost on what resources to use. Starting something like Genki from the beginning is too easy, but if I skip that part my lack of grammar knowledge will probably make things too complicated. Has anybody been in a similar situation? What resources did you use?
I had a similar situation until I started re-studying about a year ago. I used the Irodori Elementary 1 and 2 to brush up on some stuff. It teaches basic grammar, but unlike Genki, I feel like it doesn’t hold your hand and teach you “school” words. Instead it teaches vocab relevant to living in Japan as a foreign worker (IDK if this is relevant to you or not but it beats pretending to be in college again). There are audio files to practice listening/shadowing too. If you start at Elementary 1 it is mostly Japanese with English translations for instructions, but no translations for the content so it is enough to challenge you.
Also Erin’s Challenge and YouTube videos help a lot for comprehensible input. After that Italki or Language Exchange for actual conversation practice.
