Beginner

Hi Guys,

I'm sure you've seen this question multiple times(or at least a similar question).

So I just started learning japanese(1 week ago) cause after I get my degree(in 2 years) I would like to move to Japan, to do so I'm planning to study the language(also take some classes) and then take the JLPT test after I feel a bit more confident about my skills.

I can read hiragana however i'm quite slow, and now I'm learning katakana. After I learn katakana should I jump into Kanji? I feel like I read stuff without understanding it cause I have very little vocabulary, so I was wondering if the route that i'm taking is the correct one!

Any advice would be appreciated thanks!

Edit: also when I read stuff like sentences I can't tell where words end it looks like a huge word to me

Hi,

For grammar and vocabulary, there are plenty of textbooks available. Personally I learned from the two Genki books, I can recommend those - they come with plenty of exercises and audio material.

For kanji, you have two options: you can learn them in order of usefulness or in order of composition. The first method is most commonly used by textbooks (including Genki): the most common kanji are taught first, the more specialized ones later on. This ensures that you quickly learn the most essential characters, but overall it is slower and harder.

The second method is typically used by websites, such as kanjidamage.com. Here, kanji are ordered by their appearance: simple characters are shown before complex ones, and if kanji A is visually part of kanji B, they make sure you learn A first (so that B is easier). This means you'll initially spend more time learning kanji that are less useful, but the overall time to learn the base list of ~2000 characters is much shorter since it's simply more efficient.

For beginner's reading material (outside of textbooks), I refer to this post on the Tofugu blog.

Good luck with your studies!

genki 1 and 2, an introductory to intermediate japanese ("genki 3"), a dictionary of basic, intermediate, advanced japanese grammer (seiichi makino books), and using rikaichan on the internet.

also when I read stuff like sentences I can't tell where words end it looks like a huge word to me

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Parsing sentences is a matter of having the vocab/grammar knowledge to split things up correctly. Having the kanji in actually makes things much easier - all kana texts often use spaces.

Put some time aside to study daily - even if it's only half an hour. People can argue endlessly over the fine details of how you ought to learn things but in the end there's really no one way that works for everyone. The only constant is that if you don't sit down and put the time in you won't progress.

This is a good website for beginners that you could use for practice (alongside a beginner's course/textbook like Genki). It's run by the same people who run the JLPT, and it's free.