hi! hope this isn’t a repeated topic—
this is only my second one so excuse me if i do something wrong—
so yesterday i finished level three after resetting my progress a month or two back. i’m (hopefully) going to be getting a lifetime subscription of wnkn come this year’s sale, and i wanted to keep myself occupied until then. i’ve decided to refresh my hiragana + katakana recalling skills and started using knwn not too long ago.
i’ve also heard that you should be learning grammar and kanji simultaneously, so i decided to check some grammar resources and ended up finding tae kim’s guide. now i was planning to dive right in, but then i noticed it said that the guide would be using kanji basically from the start. that got me thinking, is now the right time to be thinking about grammar? should i be waiting until i have a stronger kanji foundation? thank you in advance
I’ve restarted Wanikani this year (now level 18, almost back to 23 where I was at) and I feel like I understand so much more about Japanese now. The difference? I’ve been studying grammar this time.
It is so much nicer now: I can actually read and understand stuff. Last time around, I could make up a lot of words (Wanikani teaches you a lot of common kanji first, so you’ll see them pop up all the time), but I still had no idea what the sentence ment.
So yes, the best time is to start now. Words + grammar = yaay
Bunpro combined with “A Dictionary of (…) Japanese Grammar” works quite well. Those are paid options though.
There are lots of great YouTube channels teaching Japanese, like Miku Real Japanese, Japanese Ammo with Misa or Learn Japanese From Zero!. IMHO learning from videos, especially for beginners, has many helpful side-benefits, like getting used to the sound of Japanese and training listening abilities. Also, they’re probably more engaging and entertaining that text (that’s a huge factor).
Answering your question - I wouldn’t wait with grammar. Just make it fun
Tae kim’s guide introduces the required vocab in every section, no prior knowledge required.
Begin as soon as you wish.
Just a heads up tho. It’s not a bad ressource but i find that the structure could see improvements, likewise in conveying an overall understanding of how japanese works as a language. You’ll be learning a bunch of individual grammar points but you will still likely miss pieces to make it all “click”, but you can cross that bridge when you reach it.
Personal recommendations
“Japanese grammar” on wikipedia, has a pretty good description of the japanese language while being pretty succinct
CureDolly on youtube massively oversells herself but has some very very useful information to make sense of it all (If you hate the voice you can mute and turn subtitles on).
These are the two i would start with if i were to begin all over as they easily helped me the most.
After that ive enjoyed bunpro to get the finer details down.
But back on topic, there’s never a right or wrong time to start anything. The point is to just start. But studying grammar in conjunction with a little bit of reading will help it stick better.
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