Tips for learning Japanese

I like to read manga in Japanese, and do karaoke. But, for a beginner, making lots of flash cards is helpful, and listen to the Japanese language however you can.

One website that became useful is lang-8.com It gave me some friends. One of them taught me how to pronounce Hiragana and Katakana, but I couldn't go any further due to losing contact with my teacher. Bummer. :(

I starded learning Japanese last year taking Japanese class. However when I moved to Singapore I had to continue studying on my own. I've been following the method from NihongoShark since November. One of the first steps is to learn all the official kanji ^^. But that's ok: in about 4 months I learned to recognize 2200 kanji. That is I can decypher those nasty things by looking at a text and when typing something myself (as my IME suggests the kanji, I'm just typing romaji). The only downside of rushing the kanji that way is I mostly cannot write them from scratch on paper. For instance, I quickly recognise 鬱 as "gloom" (because no other character looks that stupidly complex) but there's now way I'd write it down on paper from memory. Overall I think the pros far outweigh the cons as I now have an easier time learning vocabulary (and won't have to learn every word twice). Here's a useful link for learning the kanji in relatively short time: https://nihongoshark.com/learn-kanji/ Basically it's about intelligent flashcards in intelligent order. The whole website is really valuable too. For grammar, Tae Kim's guide looks great : http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar For vocabulary, everything is fine (the more diverse and enjoyable, the better).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btRLvTgpPX8 this is a very good clip to teach sentence structure. Think of the japanese syntax as talking like yoda as words are arranged in a different way to normal english. In this scene the little girl is speaking japanese in an english sentence structure and the subber demonstrates it as a weird thing to do.

Watching japanese tv shows, like talk shows and such, helps to get used to how every day conversation goes, since no one talks like they do in anime...

For learning Kanji, I bought 3 manga series and a book that contains 2,000 essential kanji. Currently reading through Gintama making notes on any unknown words/Kanji. It's fun and beneficial. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CB5C9yGUIAAbazS.jpg

Learning Japanese is much easier when you have Hiragana memorized. Watching anime while trying to spell out everything they said in your head is a good practice. Kanji is easier if you were taught the meaning of each individual letter. They are like puzzles, understanding them allows you to piece them together and helps you remember the pronunciation.

I found an RPG I was told about (Slime Forest Adventure), that has you learning the kana and kanji by fighting, along with more complex languages, helped. However it doesn't appear to be in development much any more. Was hoping for a phone version, but I can't find one.