I’ve just begun learning Japanese this month and so far I’ve learned hiragana and begun using this website to learn basic kanji. As far as I know, the best way to learn Japanese is by learning hiragana, then kanji, then katakana. Does anyone know at what point I should begin studying romaji, and could you recommend any resources? 
Welcome! Seems like you’ve got the hang of it to me.
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You should probably learn katakana before kanji.
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Here’s a nice little game that should be fun practice for learning romaji:
https://pbskids.org/wordworld/characters/game_dlp.html
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I’m not really sure what it means to learn romaji. Typically the way you learn hiragana is by looking at charts where the hiragana characters are transcribed with romaji. So if you’ve learned hiragana, as you say, you shouldn’t really have to bother with romaji anymore, both because you can use resources that don’t use romaji, and because you probably already know romaji.
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Yeah, honestly I’m not sure exactly what he meant either, but to be fair, since there are multiple romanization systems, you could spend some time learning them. For instance, kunrei-shiki romaji is the system Japanese people learn in school, and it looks quite different from Hepburn or word-processor romaji that we’re used to in some specific situations.
You probably wouldn’t have trouble reading it if you saw it, but sometimes people type in kunrei-shiki romaji to me in video game chats and I type back to them in it just to be consistent. So I need to be thinking about it to do it correctly. It’s weird for me to type “siaityuu” instead of “shiaichuu”
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Yeah and at my university they were using some weird shit with Xs for something for when I went in to take a placement test. I think like tsu was xu or something.
Ultimately though, im not sure why OP would want to learn any of these. Its very possible hes just confused about what romaji is.
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I probably am using the term romaji wrong here. What I mean to be asking is, I guess, when is a good time to learn the meanings of hiragana and katakana when they form sentences? (Does that make sense?)
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well, hiragana and katakana themselves never really have any meaning, they form words that do. So like you can think of お as being like ‘w’ or some other letter of the alphabet. ‘w’ doesnt mean anything on its own, but if you add it to “ater”, it means water.
In terms of actual words that only use kana, you can use the core10k if you want. I’ll see if I can find a link.
Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but here you go
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It sounds like maybe you’re talking about particles? Though typically you’ll see those written only in hiragana, not katakana.
If so, that’ll be covered by any grammar guide, for example Tae Kim’s free guide, which as far as I know is pretty good. The recommendation I’ve heard is to look into grammar once you reach level 10 or so, because you’ll know most of the kanji that’s used, though I think it doesn’t hurt to look a bit into it earlier, either, at least to get a general idea of some basic stuff.
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Oh wait, yeah maybe he is talking about that. In which case I second tae kims guide!
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I’ll try both of these and see which helps, thank you both!
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No problem, but I’m still not quite sure which was what you asked for. Could you give us an example of what you had in mind that you wanted to learn?
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Well, on the website I learned hiragana with, it gave some documents to copy and practice reading hiragana but said not to worry about the meaning, yet. I was just wondering at what point I should try to learn the meanings (I guess?) and how to learn them? Maybe I’m just not far enough into learning Japanese yet to understand how this stuff works. 
Yeah, the meanings are just written in English (or whatever language you are studying in). We normally wouldn’t call that romaji. Romaji is the use of latin/roman characters to represent Japanese words. So in your first post, things like romaji, kanji, hiragana, katakana, etc. are Japanese words that we would say are written in romaji.
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Yeah, the meanings are just written in English
The meanings of what?
Yeah so like if one of the words they had you read was がくせい and they wanted you to know its read “gakusei”, the “gakusei” part is the romaji. The meaning part is what “gakusei”/がくせい means, which is “student”.
The meaning they were talking about was the meaning of the word that all the hiragana form. Youll learn plenty of words on here and on tae kims guide.
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The Japanese words. When you study Japanese here, the meanings of kanji and vocab are in English.
Or, on his hiragana site, I assume they gave him words in hiragana but didn’t explain (or they didn’t focus on it) what they mean. If you wrote what they mean, it’d be in English.
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Oh, I think I understand! Thank you!
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this thread… lmao
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