I want to start paticipating in the absolute Beginners Book Club by the end of next month, so far i‘m done with Hiragana and Katakana and i‘ve already learned all the kanji and vocab up to level 3. I‘ve got the “Japanese” Dictionary app and my Genki 1 book plus textbook will arrive in about 10 days. Is there any extra vocab that I should or need to study for the absolute beginners book club?
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What you need most is grammar knowledge. ABBC picks usually have full furigana (and/or are low-kanji to begin with), so kanji knowledge isn’t really necessary. Vocabulary you can look up in the dictionary - or the vocab lookup sheet that the club assembles. But unless you know how sentences fit together, you will not be able to read anything.
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How long will it take for me to completely finish Genki 1? I could theoretically spend multiple hours everyday learning japanese
uhhh first of all OUCH!!!
just go into the book club and if it’s too much there are no book club police around you can always put it down and come back to it
there is a whole thing @ChristopherFritz has written but don’t know where (maybe he can link to it for you) about getting through your first japanese book, it’s gonna be painful, but once you get through one you’ll get through more.
it sounds like you might be really in over your head but it’s ok you can always come back and read the book later too. generally recommend having all N5 grammar knowledge and some N4 and you’ll be not drowning too horribly
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You won’t need to completely finish any grammar textbook for a while as long as you start and stick with one that works for you. The book clubs will answer any question you have but most manga will not be easy to dive into at first. That’s why the clubs are here to help.
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thanks!!! now I feel bad for tagging him 
will call it payback for not always posting takagisan on time
though that’s really @MrGeneric 's fault 
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Don’t feel bad, it’s good to keep him on his toes.
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Keto in mind that reading Japanese will feel more like solving riddles at first. It’s going to be confusing and sometimes frustrating. It’s part of the process.
Genki is popular but it’s not the only way to learn grammar, don’t hesitate to sample other methods.
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I‘ve been basically thinking about how to learn japanese since days, I think I’ve reached a point where i spend more time thinking about how to learn japanese than actually learning it.
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Yeah, but if you haven’t taken your time learning necessary grammar first it’s like trying to solve math riddles before getting even comfortable with the concept of numbers.
Since they already ordered it, it’s probably better to just finish it before sampling other methods. Spending lots of time to look for the best method to study is one of the biggest traps of self-directed language learning.
(Coincidentally, a trap that I too almost fell in and finally avoided by getting Genki 
)
And regarding the thread: I’d recommend taking your time learning Genki 1 grammar and vocab and then joining the Absolute Beginner Book Club when you’re done with Genki 1 (and maybe a good portion of Genki 2 for good measure). That’ll probably take much longer than a month. And it’ll still be hard enough then, but doable.
(But of course nothing will keep you from trying anyway if you really want to. Just be prepared for the realization that it’s still too hard, don’t give up, and come back later when you had more time to learn the basic grammar and some vocab.)
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I would order a few N5 and N4 graded readers, there are some good ones that go over Japanese Folk Tales and European Fairy Tales. Once you are able to understand the grammar in those you would probably be able to painfully read something from a book club.
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I took Japanese classes 20 years ago, but have mostly not used it since. Started picking it back up a few weeks ago. I’m going to try the next book (September 7th) and see how it goes. This is going to be an interesting challenge.
I don’t know what the equivalent N level would be but I got most of the way through Nakama 1 and 2 back then (seems not a common textbook anymore?) I find I remember a lot of the sentence structure/grammar, some of the conjugation details, and ひらがな. I’ve lost a lot of the vocab; that’s what I’ve started working on again.
There are way more tools available now than when I originally studied it. I’m interested to see how much I can recover.
The post referenced above is extremely helpful. Any additional hints for a “lapsed” learner would be interesting to hear.
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A trap I have fallen into multiple times 
I say go for it. It’s gonna be difficult either way so you might as well start sooner rather than later. Just be prepared for it to be very slow and frustrating.
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Patience.
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Welcome to the forum! I’d just say, find something you enjoy doing every day that you can realistically stick to. If you do more that’s great, but have an easy minimum. As long as you keep going, you will get better and better again. Ask questions on the forum as well, people are nice and enthusiastic about sharing their tools 
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I would strongly recommend you to check the Michel Thomas course for beginners. That will teach you the very basic foundations of grammar.
Also, if you start reading, a very useful resource that I’m using lately is ChatGPT. I basically tell it to explain the sentences I don’t understand, and it’s amazing.
Even though the club is named “Absolute beginners”, it is quite challenging to start reading that kind of material. You should try, but in case you get demotivated don’t be surprised. If that’s the case, you can start with simpler material, such as Tadoku books.
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Tokini Andy has a playlist of Genki videos that you could start watching before your book arrives. I think it’s useful to watch because you can treat it a bit like a classroom having someone teach you the book, with added benefit of pause/rewind/etc.
ABBC will have a vocab sheet for the books they do. This will save you time on looking up words you don’t know. You may still have to look up grammar you don’t know, but I like typing grammar points + bunpro into google for quick explanations. Or ask the club since it’s what they’re there for.
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whenever you find yourself in this situation it’s useful to ask what you actually want to do with the language, and then try and do some of that
learning how to learn is useful, but at some point you do actually have to try and use the language somehow
AI tools can be useful but at the beginner stage especially i feel you often don’t know enough to understand when they are hallucinating (or more properly when their predictive capabilities are no longer in line with reality). I think they’re more useful at the intermediate stages when you can get a better sense for when they’re talking complete shit.
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Meant this to be a reply to the OP @ShinobiMaster556 rather than the last post, sorry about that, can’t seem to edit that out.
I’ve been learning Japanese relatively seriously for 6 months now but I’m still not feeling ready for the various book club challenges that I’ve seen in this community and others. I’ve found all them all to be too advanced.
Hopefully you will get into it better than I have, but if you find it to be overwhelming or simply not rewarding (e.g. if you’re looking up words so often that you don’t enjoy the story) then I can recommend reading some very basic books and blogs.
I’ve just posted a couple of new links here (two posts in a row): Resources for Starting to Read Japanese Content - #293 by discopatrick