What is VN hooking?
Basically, you take a Japanese visual novel, tie to an extraction engine, and it dumps the text into a web browser. Then in the browser you make use of a cursor dictionary to look up words you don’t know instantly.
I have yet to see this mentioned here. But if you want to read Japanese, VN hooking is possibly the easiest way to start. It is actually how I started learning Japanese. It is certainly not the most optimal way of learning, but you should be good to start after your first grammar book and some conjugation knowledge. More than anything, it provides a constant stream of motivation.