rraigeki:

learningjapaneseandgreek:

I’m putting together all resources that I use to study Japanese into this post and will update it whenever I find something new.

Hiragana

To learn:

• The Ultimate Guide by Tofugu (Their Mnemonics have helped a lot!)
  
• Tae Kim has audio if you want to listen to the pronunciation.
  

Once I had them memorised I used the following sites to practice:

• Drag-n-Drop the Hiragana in record time!
  
• Trace Sheets to print and practice your stroke order.
  
• Want to practice different fonts? Here you can. (Under the option tab you can choose from different typefaces)

Katakana

To learn:

• The Ultimate Guide by Tofugu (Their Mnemonics have helped a lot!)
  
• Tae Kim has audio if you want to listen to the pronunciation.
  

Once I had them memorised I used the following sites to practice:

• Drag-n-Drop the Katakana in record time!
  
• Trace Sheets to print and practice your stroke order.
  
• Want to practice different fonts? Here you can. (Under the option tab you can choose from different typefaces)

Kanji

• Kanjidamage (helpful mnemonics, believe me!)
  
• iKanji app for iOS
  
• Kanji Learner’s Course by Andrew Scott Conning (I bought this book because I wanted a kanji book, it’s not necessary)
  
• Wanikani (Tofugu offers this way of learning the kanji, comes at a price, but is very well done.)
  

Textbooks

• Genki (is widely considered to be one of the best textbooks, but it comes at a price.)

Other resources on the internet

• Delvin Language (videos, recognise the word spoken, learn how to write it and what it means. Very useful)
  
• Anki flashcards (a tumblr post, not by me, on how to use Anki efficiently) 
  
• Memrise (careful, all courses are created by members, so sometimes there’s mistakes)
  
• IMABI (a ton of useful lessons)
  
• r/learnjapanese (Reddit has a very nice and supportive community)
  
• Tae Kim’s Guide to learning Japanese

To keep myself motivated in general

• Habit RPG (make an RPG out of your life, set up daily tasks, habits, to-dos and get rewards and experience for doing them. Collect armour, pets and mounts and have a bit of fun for living your life in a productive way)
  
• Forest (work for half an hour without distraction and a tree will grow, the more trees the more it’ll look like a proper forest. It’s a gimmick, but sometimes it helps.)
  
• Pomodoro Technique (there are various apps for this technique. It helps to manage your time. I find Habit RPG works best for me. But if I have some serious deadlines, pomodoro helps.)
  

owca-vs-languages:

Seeing lists of resources is always cool, so have some of my recommendations. This is the list of things (websites, apps) I’m using or I had been using in the past and that I can really recommend. It doesn’t include textbooks or random Japanese sites I use for practicing my reading, because it was getting way too big. It’s not an entry level list (although I think some of these will be helpful for people new to Japanese, too), so I skipped the stuff for learning kana. I hope at least some of those will be helpful to you!

VOCABULARY

Memrise – yeah, I know, everybody knows memrise by now, but I honestly can’t recommend it enough.  My favorite Japanese course at the moment is Core Japanese Vocabulary - I like it, because unlike many other courses, it doesn’t have separate levels for hiragana and kanji (those are kinda pointless, in my opinion, making you type the same thing twice as often) and I like the way the words are organized. There’s a lot of basic words that I already know, but the ignore function is there for a reason.

I also enjoyed 2136 Joyo Kanji by Grade - the course I used to learn the meaning of all the joyo kanji. I’m a bit hesistant recommending it, because it only has English meanings and no example words – but for me it was really great, because just recognizing general meaning of the character greatly improved my reading comprehension.  It’s not a method for everybody - you can try for yourself and see if it’s something you wanna do.

Iknow – this one is not free (the only non-free resource on this list) and I was wary of it, because with Japanese, there is a lot of paid apps/websites that offer basic things you can easily get for free elsewhere… But I found a promo code for 3 free months on there, gave it a shot and I’m absolutely in love. It’s similar to Memrise, only it has official courses made by staff and they have example sentences for every word, read by professional Japanese voice actors, as well as sentence making exercises and several different ways to check if you know the words you’re studying. I can honestly recommend it.

Renshuu - Renshuu is not only a vocab site, it also has grammar explanations, a language forum (which seems to have more newbies than native or very advanced users, so be careful while reading other people’s Japanese) and games/discussion prompts, so it’s pretty cool. I think it’s best for the vocab, though. It has many, many lists, some for JLPT, some using vocab from textbooks. There’s also a custom list creator and it’s really easy to use.

Kanji Sempai – a really nice vocab app, it shows you words and then quizzes you on them. The name is a bit misleading, because it doesn’t focus on kanji all that much, but it’s a solid vocab app.

Kotoba chan – a simple vocab quiz app with example sentences (that sometimes show sentences with the homophones of the words they were supposed to show, but oh well), very easy to use.

DICTIONARIES

www.jisho.org – Simple and great, jisho has been my friend since I’ve started learning Japanese. They have a lot of entries, not only words, but also idioms, they have a special section for kanji and example sentences, too. They are also better (although not perfect) than many other dictionaries when it comes to slang.

http://vvlexicon.ninjal.ac.jp/db/ - a pretty awesome dictionary of compound verbs. It has a Japanese-English version (and also Chinese-English and Korean-English), but I feel it works best as a monolingual dictionary. Just reading the definitions and figuring out what those compound words mean make for a nice reading practice, I think.

http://kotowaza-allguide.com/ - a monolingual dictionary of Japanese proverbs, really fun and informational.

Rikaichan – it’s a pop-up dictionary for Mozilla Firefox (it has versions for other browsers, too, but I haven’t tested those) that shows you the meaning of the word when you hover your mouse over it, as well as the furigana. It’s really, really helpful. Some people say that it’s easy for something like that to become a crutch and I see their point, but I think it’s good for me, as it keeps me from getting discouraged while reading longer texts. Definitely my favorite resource ever.

LISTENING

Delvin Language - this one isn’t really for advanced students (after a placement test I was starting from the most advanced level, and my listening skills leave MUCH to be desired – and I still find some of what I get to be too easy), but it’s a nice practice, since it uses clips from Japanese drama/anime or informative youtube videos about Japan. It’s both listening comprehension practice and a way to acquire new vocabulary.

Nihongo  no mori – it’s an absolutely amazing youtube channel ran by very lovely native Japanese speakers. I put this in the listening category, but those videos are about grammar and vocab, so watching them helps in so many ways. I’m watching the N3 and N2 stuff, but I know they also have some videos for beginners and N1 students.

KANJI

Anki Aniki – it’s an iOS app for learning kanji. It’ll show you a set number of kanji every day, along with their meaning and possible readings, and then quiz you on it. I find it pretty helpful, even though there are no example words and I usually don’t like the idea of learning the readings without any context – but as a supplement to learning kanji in a more conservative way it’s pretty good.

GRAMMAR

Jgram- it’s kind of a grammar wiki. Many, many entries, with a lot of example sentences (some of their translations to English are really weird sometimes, but most of it is perfectly fine).

Maggie Sensei – a site that is not only absolutely adorable, but also very helpful. It has detailed explanations, many example sentences and a lot of lessons available. A lot of cute doggie pictures, too.

Japanese test 4 you- this site has a lot of information about grammar for all JLPT levels, with many example sentences and also all kinds of tests (grammar, listening, vocab, kanji).  I’ve just found it recently, but it’s already proven really useful to me.