Which resources should I tackle for grammar and vocabulary after finishing Tae Kim's grammar guide?

Grammar

• Tae Kim's grammar guide
  • I already finished this. It was a decent beginner material despite being free.
• Genki 1 and 2
  • I think Genki and Tae Kim's guide overlap a lot. I'm probably going to skip this.
• imabi
  • I was considering imabi as the next step since it was free and seemed comprehensive. But, someone told me that imabi isn't good as a learning material but nice as a reference material because it doesn't have a flow of practices. However, I may not need a smooth flow of exercises and practices since I already got the hang of japanese from Tae Kim's guide, and I'll have a lot of reading practices with reading materials.
• Tobira
  • I also considered tobira as another next step, but it was somewhat expensive, and I couldn't even find the table of contents for the book. I definitely don't want to buy an expensive thing without knowing what's inside. Plus, I strongly prefer electronic documents(e.g. HTML, PDF, ...).
• ......???

Vocabulary (Words and Kanji)

• Mining words and kanji from sentences in reading materials of appropriate levels
  • Free Graded Readers on the Internet
    • Since I am jobless, I looked for free graded readers, and I found free graded readers on the internet. Although commercial graded readers may be of higher quality, I want to avoid bleeding money. I suspect free graded readers would be ok for my purpose.
  • NHK Web Easy or NHK
    • I could try this after reading free graded readers.
• Learning words and kanji from Anki or other spaced repetition softwares.
  • I once tried building an Anki kanji deck, but I was overwhelmingly bored within a month. For the commonly used words, I think just mining words and kanji from reading materials would be ok. For esoteric rarely-used words and kanji characters, I could try putting them in Anki decks.
• ........????

In my honest opinion and personal experience, you will do fine with the following:

classic.jisho.org -> japanese/english and kanji dictionary
国語・英和・和英・類語・中国語辞書検索 - goo辞書 -> japanese / japanese dictionary, offers a more in depth explanation with use cases

株式会社アルク (thank you Nekojita-san) is a collection of phrases, expressions translated from japanese to english, and vice versa. Contains a lot of expressions for many different situations, including specific words if you're in college for example. Will do a lot for your spoken and written japanese as well

Nihongo Sou Matome and or Kanzen Master will be responsible for introducing you to japanese grammar and idiomatic expressions , these are grouped by JLPT levels.


Your reading studies are supposed to improve your vocabulary, anything goes, from Sankei Shinbun to NHK, raw manga, blogs and whatever; It might become rather boring for a while, but thats it, Its a barrier you gotta deal with.
What I did was,I would write down every new word I found and an example phrase (extracted from alc.co.jp) that (repeated a thousand times)helped me memorize new kanji as well. You will probably miss a lot of information, struggle to comprehend the syntax and /or grammar and sometimes you will even be able to translate every single word out of a sentence while completely not comprehending what it means at all.

One thing to keep in mind is, its supposed to be like that, I'm stressing it because some people will think to themselves "Its not working" and try to search for more and more resources and keep asking more seasoned forum members for more "tips and hints", when in reality things are working fine and you're just oblivious to your own progress in the language.

Kraise said:

国語・英和・和英・類語・中国語辞書検索 - goo辞書 -> japanese / japanese dictionary, offers a more in depth explanation with use cases

株式会社アルク

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Those are definitely useful. I already have them on my bookmarks. However, my japanese is not advanced enough to utilize japanese-japanese dictionaries.

Kraise said:

Nihongo Sou Matome and or Kanzen Master will be responsible for introducing you to japanese grammar and idiomatic expressions , these are grouped by JLPT levels.

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Are nihongo sou matome and kanzen master supposed to be the next level of Tae Kim's guide? I mentioned that I finished Tae Kim's japanese grammar guide in my post. Not sure if they are redundant, yet.

crocket said:

the next level of Tae Kim's guide?

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Tae Kim's guide is an edu-turd worth exactly what you paid for it.

Why does your country flag keep changing? Are you traveling a lot?

crocket said:

Are nihongo sou matome and kanzen master supposed to be the next level of Tae Kim's guide? I mentioned that I finished Tae Kim's japanese grammar guide in my post. Not sure if they are redundant, yet.

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I'm assuming you've studied Tae Kim's guide, done your independent research and is in fact, just beyond Genki 1/2 , Sou Matome books start at JLPT N3 if I recall correctly, Kanzen Master is a bit more broad.

However, if you feel overwhelmed somehow, dont underestimate the power of Genki, and just try to stick to it for a while.

BTW: I dont know much about graded readers, other users might be a lot more helpful than I am.Also keep in mind I'm telling you pretty much how I've studied japanese till now, its just my own experience .

Mike Cash said:

Tae Kim's guide is an edu-turd worth exactly what you paid for it.

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That's a bit harsh. I studied it, and I thought it was ok. Also, there are reviews that it is an ok beginner material. I'd like to hear a more in-depth analysis of Tae Kim's guide if you didn't mind spending more time.

Mike Cash said:

Why does your country flag keep changing? Are you traveling a lot?

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Short Answer : I use web proxies.
Long Answer : In the past, I was an immature and careless person. I was burnt hard multiple times by revealing my personal information on the internet. Revealing where I am to google may not hurt me. But, I learned from various experiences that revealing my sensitive personal information including my location to people whom I directly communicate with can tangibly hurt me. For example, some bad people made fun of my nationality. In the past, some people even made fun of my bad english when I told them that I wanted to learn english.

I learned that there are people out there who would hurt me for fun or any other purpose with any kind of information that pertains to me.

After myriad bad experiences, I made a policy of not revealing my location or various other personal information unless it becomes relevant or necessary. I'm willing to provide my personal information if doing so is relevant or necessary for the situation. Otherwise, I quite prefer to hide my location with proxies.

I'd appreciate if you respected my operations security methods.

Kraise said:

I'm assuming you've studied Tae Kim's guide, done your independent research and is in fact, just beyond Genki 1/2 , Sou Matome books start at JLPT N3 if I recall correctly, Kanzen Master is a bit more broad.

However, if you feel overwhelmed somehow, dont underestimate the power of Genki, and just try to stick to it for a while.

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I suspect sou matome and kanzen master are both good materials. However, I strongly prefer electronic books or electronic documents to paper materials after tasting e-books. Do you know of decent electronic materials for grammar? Also, I prefer free materials to commercial materials if possible.