Japanese learning resources

Gamb's Guide

This is the main resource that I was using to give an order to learn things in. It's focused on being able to read untranslated visual novels in Japanese. It proposes:

• Learning hiragana and katakana first
• Learning grammar from reading a textbook as fast as possible
• Then learning vocabulary from flashcards until you know 2000 - 6000 words
• Then reading native material (namely, VNs)

djtguide Learn Kana

A kana recognition training game. Shows you a kana and scores you on whether you recognize it, with the ability to choose which kana are shown (so you can fully learn five, and then the next five, and so on).

Duolingo

Duolingo's focus on teaching is listening practice for individual Japanese sentences, and handwriting practise for kana and kanji.

WaniKani

WaniKani teaches reading individual words, focusing on reading kanji, hence the name.

The advice for learning Japanese kanji given in Gamb's guide is that kanji don't appear on their own and don't have pronunciations independent of being in words; in Japanese, kanji are just sememes. There's hence no meaningful notion of "learning kanji" seperately from learning vocabulary.

WaniKani disbelieves this, and instead

• teaches a set of WaniKani platform-specific kanji-parts, called radicals, that each appear in many kanji. Because these are formed from the same generator of breaking down kanij, WaniKani's radical list has overlap with other lists of radicals
• once a radical has been learned, teaches the kanji that contain that radical, with their primary meaning and the list of possible pronunciations that it can take when it appears in a word
• once the kanji and its pronunciations have been learned, teaches words that contain that kanji.

Each radical, kanji and word come with associated mneumonics for the shape and where relevant pronunciation.

This means that rather than learning kanji as being drawn from the infinite space of possible squiggles, they're learned as draws from a more finite space of easier-to-learn WaniKani radicals; and rather than learning words as being drawn from a large space of valid strings of Japanese phonemes, from a more finite space of possible readings for their component kanji; at the cost of adding a lot of additional scaffolding to learn that isn't used at higher levels or outside of WaniKani.

Dictionaries

Wiktionary contains basically every Japanese word. The benefit I find from Wiktionary is that, for each word, it includes the Japanese word, and the Chinese etymology of the kanji, which can make the meaning clearer or more memorable. For example, the page for 食 has

• every definition and reading of 食 used in Japanese
• the Kangxi radical and composition; in this case, it's 食 with no extra strokes
• the etymology; it explains that 食 in the Oracle Bone script was a picture of a mouth over a bowl of rice.

The Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary has a subset of Japanese words, because dictionaries are finite in size. It's a paper dictionary, which I like. It's bilingual between Japanese and British English

Jisho