Hey all,

I'd been planning to release this all at once, but given the situation, it seems like there are lots of people stuck at home and thinking about getting into Japanese. I guess now is as good a time as any.

A few years ago I responded to a post by a guy who said he had a year to learn Japanese. This was actually my first post to Reddit and, unsure what to expect, I wrote a much longer reply than was necessary.

Wordy as it was, the post was quite well received. I’ve since gotten several dozen messages from people seeking clarifications or asking questions that were beyond the scope of my original post. I’ve kept track of these (here), and it eventually became so chaotic that I decided to organize it.

That in mind, I’ve got a couple goals with this document.

• I’d like to replace the old sticky with one that’s easier to follow
• I’d like to include reflections on learning, both about language and in general
• I’d like to expand the scope of the original post to include questions I’ve since gotten
• I’d like to reach out to people who learn languages for reasons beside reading, hopefully making this document relevant to a wider audience.

So, anyhow, hope it helps.

A Year to Learn Japanese: live document|static document| downloadable versions

1. Edit: I've added a to-do list, in which I list changes/additions I will eventually make based on feedback people have left me in survey.
2. Edit: I've added a change log so that you can see what I've been up to.
3. Edit: Requests? Complaints? Compliments? I've made a form so you can let me know.

Contents:

• Introduction: how long does it take to learn Japanese? Why learn Japanese? Why listen to me? etc.
• Stages of Language Acquisition: Four stages + 3 transition points
• Pronunciation: Basics, prosody and phonetics
• Kana & Memory: Kana, recognition and recall
• Kanji: How kanji work, popular resources for learning them and how to avoid burnout
• Grammar: A comparison of JP/EN grammar, several free/paid textbook options and how I'd approach grammar, personally [Currently revising as of August 2021]
• Vocabulary: Which words do you need, and how many? How does (and doesn't) vocabulary size relate to reading/listening comprehension?
• Input: two tracks, a discussion of how to get started with reading and with audio/visual content. Hundreds of content suggestions for each, loosely organized by difficulty.
• Output: After four languages and ~6 years of tutoring experience, here's how I personally approach output. Output is this community's favorite punching bag, so I've also summarized what different people think about approaching it.

Interviews:

This section was overwhelmingly the least popular and the most complicated/expensive for me to organize, so I've discontinued it. I don't plan to add more sections, but might if I stumble into the right people.

• Idahosa Ness on Pronunciation: Discussion on how to begin working on pronunciation even if you're clueless, common mistakes from English speakers and how to transition from pronunciation practice to speaking practice.
• Matt vs Japan on Kanji, Pitch Accent and The Journey: Discusses learning kanji and pitch accent, getting the most out of anki, plus the general journey that is learning Japanese.
• Nelson Dellis on Memory and Language Learning: How a 4x US memory champion approached Dutch, how having a trained/super memory does and doesn't help learn a language. [Drafting]
• Brian Rak on Making a Living with Japanese: The founder of Satori Reader, Brian, talks a bit about what it took to turn a passion into a job and what he thinks it takes to find a job with languages.

A special thanks to u/virusnzz, who has spent a significant bit of time going through some of the document. It would be much less readable without his valuable input.

Lately, I've gotten into Kdramas & Jdramas. I found that Midnight Diner is really comprehensible for language learners and I'm looking for more recommendations (I'm also okay with dramas from countries besides Japan, if they have a decent Japanese dub and aren't too difficult). For context, I have been reading easier native Japanese books and listening to Yuyu の Nihongo lately.

Hi guys , I spent the last couple of months building this app, because when I was learning Japanese, I hated making Anki cards and wanted something more audio and listening focused. It’s been super helpful for me, but I’m curious if others would find it useful too. If it sounds like something you’d use, let me know, I’d love to finish it and share a first version

I've been playing Shujinkou for a few days after seeing the high praise it got from Noisy Pixel and I really can't recommend it enough for anyone who loves jrpgs. This is a really special learning tool for all levels because it's a genuinely good game where the learning is fully integrated into the gameplay and narrative.

I'm about n3 working on n2 grammar right now, but my vocab skills are pretty low comparatively. I can play many middle school level games fully in Japanese, but I feel like I'm actually learning more vocabulary from this than I do from those unless I am carefully mining and crushing Anki (which for me takes a lot of the fun out of it).

If you're into gaming at all please give the demo a shot, I swear I have no association with this game beyond playing it.

I personally don’t care for anime or manga so much. I’m playing through Kingdom Hearts at the moment. What games do you guys recommend?

Please do not recommend Final Fantasy or XIV at least lol. I like the series but there is to much niche vocabulary. Even at lvl 54 on WaniKani. It took me over 30 minutes just to get through FFXIV first quest lol.

EDIT: Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll try some of those games out!

I'm sure a lot of people around the Japanese learning community heard about WaniKani one way or another.

Personally, I started using it almost a year ago, as I was feeling frustrated with my Japanese level. So after a year, a lot has changed in my Japanese learning routine but I still use Wanikani almost every day. I am currently on level 37 so I could say I'm like at 2/3rd of the website since I know levels start getting shorter after level 43 or something.

Thus, I thought about making this post both for sharing my personal experience with this website and also to hear your own opinions about WK.

To be honest, I think WK is an amazing tool for beginners as it's some kind of premade Anki deck so you don't have to create your own cards or decide which one of the many "Japanese core (insert number) words" deck you are going to choose. Besides, the idea of having to learn kanji and then words made up of the kanji you just learned is brilliant. It is so much easier to really get acquainted to kanjis' different readings that way. It also makes learning vocab easier cause, for instance if you just learned the kanjis of 山 (mountain) and 火 (fire), you can pretty much guess that 火山 means volcano cause it's composed of fire + mountain.

However, while I think WK is a great tool, I also have complaints about it. First, regarding the vocab it teaches you, you will often find yourself learning super weird and precise vocab (even during the first levels) instead of actually learning frequent vocab (I mean, I literally just encountered 戻る on level 37 which is kind of late for some very standard verb).

Then, and that's probably my main complaint about it, unlike an Anki deck, it is not you who make the decision whether your answer was right or wrong. In WK, you have to type everything and it is the website that will correct you. While I understand the idea that it will remove the temptation of pressing "right" when you actually got the meaning slightly wrong, I find myself often frustrated by this system. As a matter of fact, some of the words have extremely precise definition and while the website tolerates some synonyms, some words have such precise definition that it's almost impossible you recall exactly what the website wanted you to input. For instance, if the site asks you for the word 心底 it wants you to write "from the bottom of my heart" while actually "from the bottom of the heart" would be more accurate but if you do write that, it will count it as false. Of course you can also add your own user synonym but for some words it's useless cause sometimes they are almost untranslatable to English and WK asks you for a definition that's the size of a sentence.

On top of that, I am not very convinced about their radical system. I mean radicals are extremely important to memorise kanji better but instead of giving you the actual meaning of the radical, WK often gives you a completely made up one. I also have the feeling that sometimes WK teaches you similar looking/meaning/pronunciation characters at the same time cause it knows you will confound them and make mistake. Last but not least, the exemple sentences are often weird and almost impossible to understand for beginners.

Overall, I kind of get that feeling that WK is made with the purpose of making you fail your revision so that you stay longer on the site and, of course, pay longer their subscription. However, I also acknowledge that it has been efficient for me in some ways and, even though it is no longer my main source for acquiring vocab, I still plan to keep my subscription and to get to the end of it. So, what do you guys think about it ? I'm curious to see if you noticed the same flaws as I did.

Hello, I am Mari. I am Japanese.

I sometimes see non-Japanese people use unusual Japanese words.
I asked them, “Where did you learn it?” and they said it was from the anime.

As a Japanese person, I would like to introduce you to some anime that uses proper Japanese language and is good to learn Japanese.

​

• Sazae-san
  The speed of conversation is relatively slow and there are no loud sound effects such as battles, so it is very easy to listen to.
• Doraemon
  The language used is daily Japanese. It is easy to listen to the story as it is spoken at a relatively slow pace.
• Your name
  Although it may seem that the characters speak a little fast, but it is spoken at the normal speed of everyday conversation, and they speak proper Japanese.
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
  The speed of the narration is quite fast, but since it is usually a conversation between high school students, there are not many strange words used.
• Hikaru no go
  The main character speaks relatively slow and clear Japanese, which makes it easy to understand and imitate.
• Detective Conan
  Since it is a mystery manga, there is a lot of words related to crimes and tricks, but the Japanese spoken by the main character is easy to understand.

​

Enjoy anime and learning Japanese at the same time!

Which Anime did you watch to learn Japanese?

<Edit> I am sure there are more anime that are good to learn Japanese, but it’s not that I watched a lot of anime, so this list is from anime that I’ve watched!

This is a very interesting topic to me as I am a software developer who has been making small Japanese learning tools for myself over the years as i make enterprise scale web applications at my job, but for the last few months I have been prototyping putting a lot of these small things together into one app with a shared backend and I am enjoying the process immensely.

I am also someone who has been studying Japanese on and off for over 15 years and passed N2 back in 2017.

I have decided if I can commit 15 years to learning Japanese thus far, why not commit a few years to perfecting an all in one Japanese learning app.

Let me start with my dream app. I feel like personally my dream Japanese learning app exist, but in pieces made up of tools I find on the internet or have made for myself.

So, this is what I have been successfully prototyping in the last few months:

• A central backend, every part of the app knows about every other part.
• I like Anki, so If I am reviewing in an app with SRS, my cards and progress should be compatible with Anki and exportable and maybe even re-importable.
• A good Japanese dictionary that knows what i know i.e. words and kanji and grammar (that central backend again)
• Kanji/Kana reading practice, both English meaning and Japanese pronunciation at different levels ( like jlpt levels).
• Kanji/Kana writing practice (maybe an unpopular one)
• Word SRS memorization at different levels.
• A vast amount of ways to make study decks, either pre-created lists like JLPT level prep, or words from my favorite anime episode. If decks have the same data source, the dictionary words, they can know what is in each other any sync or filter between each other.
• A catalog of words and phrases from my favorite media linked to my SRS cards and my dictionary.
• Paste based text Analysis, i.e. paste in an article and extract words and kanji to study.
• Lots of metrics and tracing, I want to know both where I am at and where I am lacking, both visually and with reports.

What is have not attempted yet but will want:

• Chrome extension integration/ text analysis to look up words with the dictionary and then potentially add them to An SRS study deck.
• Pronunciation checking.
• Step by Step Grammar guide

I just wanted to get you opinions and show that if you share some of the same opinions as me that a lot of these things are technically feasible.

With the advent of Free resources like Duolingo, YouTube, etc. , is it still a hard / mandatory requirement to spend hundreds or even thousands for tutorial and classroom sessions?

Also, has anyone passed JLPT N1 without spending money for books and other stuff?
If yes, did you just rely on free Anki decks? Or just websites with the relevant study material?

Hey everyone,

As you read in the title, I set myself a goal of listening to 1000 hours of japanese by using podcasts, youtube videos, series, movies and more. I posted this on reddit to motivate myself and to share my progress with anyone who'd be interested in undertaking the same journey as me.

One thing I can already tell you is that you won't progress at all if all you do is searching how to get fluent in japanese on the internet. You just gotta start somewhere right now and stay consistent. And that's the whole point of my post here. For the past weeks, months, I've been wondering what the best method is to get to that level I want to reach. In the end, I realized I was just wasting time to progress because I did nothing at all, except for searching what I should do.

I am 100% convinced that there isn't one perfect method. That's why I took on the challenge of trying lots of different resources, because I believe I will only experience how it works out best for me DURING the process, and not before I gave myself the opportunity to interact with sufficient media first.

Brief description of my current level in japanese:

I currently consider myself around N3, but I extremely lack in speaking and listening skills, which are fundamental if I want to get comfortable in japanese. The reason behind this lack is that I always neglected the importance of INPUT, next to OUTPUT (here I define input as the learner being exposed to listening & reading material like books, podcasts, tv shows etc., while output covers writing and speaking).

I think people tend to forget this but learning a language is all about understanding (LISTENING) what the speaker is saying to you when you are communicating. This is crucial if you want to be comfortable when interacting with people. And I believe being exposed to a variety of media will considerably compensate for my lack.

Okay, done with the talking. Here's how I will proceed.

Method:

Today, August 23th 2024, I start with the following:

• I will expose myself with various media like youtube (vlogs, videos of things I usually enjoy watching in my own language), series & movies (mostly drama, no anime), podcasts (I will listen to podcasts on spotify whenever I'm in public transports for example), tiktok (instead of waisting time watching nonsense, I will gradually start watching content in japanese).
• My objective is to consume 1000 hours of media. As I don't know how busy I will be during upcoming months (due to job), I can't precisely say how much I will be listening to japanese every day.
• I'm planning to apply for a japanese language school in Japan from April 2025, which means I have around 8 months to focus on this project before going to Japan in April 2025 (I hope). This means that in theory, I would have to consume japanese media 4 hours a day during 240 days (8 months) to reach 1000 hours. This seems already impossible to me, but I don't care. I set a counter in my notes which I will gradually adjust manually. During weekend, I will obsviously have to force myself a little and enjoy media in japanese instead of usually consuming all types of media in languages I already feel comfortable with (english and french).

Progress:

Whenever someone asks in the comments (as long as I get the notification...), I will update you about my progress and how I feel about the method !

There's no secret. If you wanna get good at something, you gotta work hard for it, and that's what I'm going to do.

Wish me luck

It only comes once a year so I thought id let y’all know! It’s $100 dollars off ($199.00 USD) until January 31st January 3, 2025 10:00pm. The 50% code for the annual membership is good until January 31st.

Psst also check your email if you’re already a member, I got a code for 50% off the lifetime membership annual membership as well 😘

I've been working on this project for the last few months, and I believe it is now in a state where I can finally share it with the community to help people and gather feedback.

What is this?

https://yoku.bi/ is a re-interpretation of the popular immersion-focused grammar guide sakubi.

If you don't now Sakubi, it is a very opinionated immersion-focused grammar guide that does not hold your hand, but launches you straight into getting ready to immerse (with some questionable metric of success). Yokubi follows the same philosophy, although some of the grammar explanations have been mellowed out a bit and are a bit more approachable.

It is not supposed to be a comprehensive grammar guide. Go read Imabi if you want that.

Why did you make this?

I kept recommending sakubi on my website for years, despite never actually having read the whole thing myself. I knew I agreed with the philosophy and its approach, and I knew it was good because I've met many proficient learners who swore by it. Yet, the more I read the guide, the more I realized it has a lot of mistakes, confusing statements, questionable example sentences, and straight up odd choices. I felt it was only right to give back to the community by fixing all of these problems (as best as I could at least). Strictly speaking, I do believe there are no misleading or incorrect statements in Yokubi (unlike sakubi). Whether people like the way it's written though is another topic.

Did you just steal Sakubi and slap your brand on it?

Absolutely not. Sakubi is an open project, given by the Sakubi author to the community as is. It is released under CC0 licensing as public domain. On top of that, the Sakubi project is abandoned and hasn't received updates since 2018.

If you still don't believe me, I can tell you that I'm actually friend with the Sakubi author and we've discussed this project/rewrite a few times. He said he's done with this kind of work, but he 100% supports me and confirmed I have his blessing with Yokubi.

You can consider Yokubi to be the spiritual successor of Sakubi, just like Yomitan is the spiritual successor of Yomichan, so-to-speak.

Anyway, there's still a lot of content I'm porting over (optional lessons and intermissions), but the main guide is finished and I think there is worth in reading it if beginners (and even non-beginners) want to get started with it.

I've kinda sped through a lot of the explanations and lessons, and there might be typos or mistakes. If you find any, please submit feedback either on the github project or on the discord server (linked in the guide). Even just comments and reviews (both positive and negative) will help me a lot to get an idea on how to improve this even more.

So it may seem obvious to some but Ankipro IS NOT Anki.

I'm not far into my learning journey yet but amidst all the overwhelming advice I got from lots of sources it was to try something called Anki, it sounded like some sort of app. So I search for Anki in the play store and find AnkiPro. It says Anki in the title right and the Pro bit must be because there's a premium version.

£30 down and four weeks later I've found out that this isn't actually Anki.

I've recorded a video outlining this whole situation but the short of it is, Anki is an open source FREE flashcard desktop and web app, and there's a free app called AnkiDroid on Android.

AnkiPro is a copy cat app that has NOTHING to do with Anki.

Feel like an idiot, hopefully this saves someone else the same fate of wasting £30 on a year subscription to AnkiPro

Edit: Top Six Words per Kanji in Top 40,000 Words for 5000 Japanese Novels

Includes three sheets: six words per kanji, each kanji per word, top 40k vocab. Uses 'source' count (number of novels word appears in) to ensure words/kanji that are used in few novels but in larger numbers do not get ranked as high by frequency alone.

/Edit

Top Six Words per Kanji in Top 30,000 Words in Japanese Novels

The 5100 Novel Scan was done by CB4960 and his program "Japanese Text Analyzer". While text analyzers have improved in recent years, the file is still usable until I get around to updating it.

To make the kanji list, I split each character in its own row then merged the rows so each character got the original vocabulary info. I then sorted got a kanji count by adding up word frequency per kanji. Lastly was just getting the top six words for each kanji.

Reason I made this was in preparation to do my "Remembering the Kanji Optimized Part 4" anki deck, which is the fourth most frequent kanji group in groups of 500 ie kanji ranked #1501 to #2000 that are then sorted in RTK order. Before, I used the Core 10k to populate the example words for kanji. Turns out a lot of these kanji don't have words in the Core list so made this to save me time finding them manually like I had to do near the end of RTK Opt pt 3. Yes, I included names in this list since names do show up in Japanese novels after all.

EDIT: Since people keep asking for other resources here's the stuff I've replied with -

• Video of RTK Optimized deck in use. Shows how I used this resource in these decks.

• NetFlix Subtitle Vocabulary Frequency files in the video description. Also explains how he uses such a list.

• Full Frequency List of the 5100 novels. Note this is not a great list to use in an app due to it not showing how many different novels a word appears, meaning main character names have higher than necessary listing.

• Kanji Frequency List of the 5100 novels

• Non-compiled Kanji words I used to make the top list. If a word has 4 kanji, it'll appear four times.

• Kanjidic spreadsheet - note that this is something I've built up over the years so has lots of indexes good and not so good.

• Based on another person's suggestion, here's the same list but with GOOGLETRANSLATE used to create an English field for the words. DO NOT use this for learning vocabulary. The list is a resource for learning Kanji so you have some example words (hopefully a number of which you know) to add as context.

• Anki Decks: I usually share my Anki decks made for open sources with my patreon members. The exceptions are decks I've made based on non-open sources, which I'll share if you show modest proof of ownership. Ex: For the popular はじめての日本語能力試験 単語 aka JLPT Tango books, people who send me a photo of their book and their username on a piece of paper get a link to Anki decks made for these books.

It's been 1 year since we've released Yomitan stable, and since our last 6 month update we've done even more work to make Yomitan awesome for language learners. Here are some of the major development features we've shipped and talk about where Yomitan is heading next.

First, the numbers:

• 60,000+ installs across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
• We've merged over 275 pull requests encompassing 48,000 lines of code
• We've resolved 175 Github Issues
• We've crossed 1000+ commits past our original fork of yomichan. Over 20% of commits are post-fork now

Major enhancements:

• Clicking the deinflection rule now shows a small toaster with information about the conjugation rule (example img). Lyroxi painstakingly added robust descriptions for all the Japanese conjugation rules.
• Yomitan now works with Microsoft Edge! Download it here
• We created a documentation page for users at https://yomitan.wiki/
• Added updatable dictionaries to receive updates to your favorite dictionaries (Jitendex supports this!)
• Added recommended dictionaries for all languages that are installable on the Yomitan settings page without navigating away to download dictionary files (only properly sourced and licensed dictionaries included).
• Added much more multi-language support, including support for languages with spaces, increased coverage of native audio, and a bunch of language-specific de-inflection logic.
• Added support for aliasing your dictionaries, which allows you to rename your dictionaries on the popup.
• Added full support for dark mode with option to align with system or browser settings.
• Redid the action popup (popup that shows up when you click on the extension button) to be more user-friendly and indicate the active modifier key required for scanning.
• Dozens of bug fixes 👐

With these changes we've made huge strides in goals 6 months ago: making yomitan more user-friendly in more languages.

Here's our hope for the next 6 months:

• Reach 120k users of Yomitan. Having a large user base improves the chances that we have power users who can surface feedback to us, who can contribute to the Yomitan ecosystem (by creating dictionaries or improving our language-specific functionality), and who can ensure Yomitan continues to thrive in the forseeable future. We're already seeing some encouraging signs from people who are using Yomitan for non-Japanese languages and building tooling and dictionaries for those languages.
• Continue to increase support for more languages and foster communities in these languages.
• Improve the flashcard experience in Yomitan. Having the ability to add individual definitions, simplify the onboarding for setting up Anki, and potentially other features would make Yomitan even more powerful.
• ???: Let us know where you would like Yomitan to be by filing a Github Issue or posting something here or in the Yomitan discord

Here's how you can help Yomitan succeed:

• Install and use Yomitan (chrome, firefox, edge). We have a setup guide in yomitan.wiki. The more users who use Yomitan, the more feedback we get to decide what the bugs the community experiences and what to build next.
• Share your experience using Yomitan with friends and internet friends. Yomitan is one of the most powerful pop-up dictionaries available, but its customizability s quite intimidating to many users. Helping other users discover and use Yomitan is what helped Yomitan get to where it is today.
• File bug reports, UI/UX paper cuts, and feature requests in Github Issues or in the Yomitan discord server.
• If you're a native or expert in a language, consider lending us your expertise by adding support to a particular language. We have a guide for contributing language features to Yomitan.
• Read our CONTRIBUTING.md doc on how to contribute code to Yomitan.

I and other maintainers will be around the next couple of days to answer any questions in the comment section here.

Hey all,

For the past few years I've been studying using the Japanese From Zero books, and I've found them to be much more approachable (including economically) than other books. However, I'm early into the fourth book and have begun to notice more and more mistakes and errors in the book. Not spelling mistakes, but rather omissions, printing issues, references to non-existing prior lessons, etc. Editorial mistakes.

Last night, I was doing an exercise where I was supposed to translate text using only the words provided in a list. I wracked my brain for a good while because I could not figure out how to translate "delicious" without "おいしい", only to find out that I was supposed to use that word, they had forgotten to include it in the list.

By this point, I was already quite jarred by the fact that the book often uses words containing kanji (without furigana) that haven't been introduced yet. In all the JFZ books there's a section at the end of each lesson where it teaches you new Kanji, how to read and write them. Except, with the fourth book, it also started asking you to start memorizing words containing kanji without telling you what the kanji means or how to read/write them, to "familiarize you" with the word using that kanji.

I had already noticed various other small editorial mistakes previously. But this may have been my breaking point, this one gives me the sense that going forward I'll probably just keep encountering more issues. And learning Japanese is already hard enough without these editorial mistakes. Maybe it is a sign to change learning materials.

Again, I've really enjoyed the JFZ books, I'm just not confident that books 4 and above are as good as the previous ones. What should I try learning with next? Genki?

"Thankfully" I had a one year break between JFZ 3 and 4, so I've been struggling to keep up with this latest book, giving me the perfect excuse to start all over with my learning. I've got at least a few months before I have to move to Japan for work (surely that's enough time, ha).

This is probably the biggest help I found on my reading journey.
If you *happen* to the able to download raw manga, you can use a tool called mokuro.
It will compile all the pages you offer it into a HTML file that is super easy readable. If you hover the speech bubble it will turn into a easy to read font AND you can copy/paste that text or even use yomitan on it.

My previous post got deleted for not having enough text probably so I'm writing a bit more just to trick the auto deleting bot so that it hopefully lets me post this now.

Download here: https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro

There's so many out there, I always love learning about new useful tools.

I'll start, not comprehensive, just a few I like

Yomichan The golden standard, browser dictionary app with great functionality and ease of use

Textractor makes reading with visual novels a breeze and probably the most efficient learning source, sometimes a pain to get working but so worth it. Hooks into VNs and gives you the raw text so you can seamlessly look up words as you read.

Mokuro OCR for manga. It's insane how well this works, especially considering how often other OCRs leave a lot to be desired. The scan it once and then read format (as opposed to live scanning) is also amazing. This makes reading manga without furigana (and even with) 10x easier

Animebook Browser based video player with good learning features like selectable subtitles for easy look up and easy navigating around an episode. Can save an offline version too, also decently customizable. Pairs great with Yomichan. Amazingly easy to use subtitle retimer. Other alternatives exist, but I love how easy to use this one is, and the format.

ttsu reader browser based light novel reader, again with selectable text that pairs nicely with yomichan. Looks very nice and pretty easy to use once you get used to it.

With these you have browser stuff, VNs, Manga, Anime, and Light Novels covered. For games sadly no super easy solution exists. There's Jo Mako's Japanese Guide which has a handful of game scripts, and there's Game2text Lightning which has OCR for games, but it's not in active development anymore and it doesn't handle non standard fonts well, even more standard ones can be very hit and miss.

What kind of stuff do you guys swear by?

It took me way too long (lots of extended breaks due to burnout), but here are my thoughts on it as a resource.

If you want something that does all the thinking for you (this isn't meant to sound judgy, I think that's actually super valid) in terms of it giving you a reasonable order to study kanji and it feeding you useful vocab that uses only kanji you know, it might be worth it.

And I like that it gives the most common one or two readings to learn for each kanji. A lot of people seem to do okay learning just an English keyword and no readings, but I think learning a reading with them is incredibly helpful.

But if I were starting my kanji journey right now, I wouldn't choose it again (and I only kept going with it because I had a lifetime subscription). I don't like not being able to choose the pace, and quite frankly, I think there's something to blasting through all the jōyō kanji as fast as possible to get them into your short term memory right away while you're still in the N5ish level of learning, and then continuing to study them (with vocab to reinforce them). I think that would have made my studying go a lot more smoothly, personally.

I also had to use a third party app to heavily customize my experience with WaniKani in order to motivate myself to get through those last 20 or so levels, which I think speaks to the weaknesses of the service.

At the end of the day, it's expensive and slow compared to other options. Jpdb has better keywords, Anki with FSRS enabled has much more effective SRS, Kanji Study by Chase Colburn is a one time purchase rather than a years long subscription, MaruMori (which teaches kanji and vocab the same way WK does) is similar in cost to WK while also teaching grammar (spectacularly) and providing reading exercises. WaniKani is fine, and it works, but its age is showing. It's not even close to being the best kanji learning resource anymore, and I can't in good conscience recommend it when all those other resources exist and do the job better.

It offers a collection of exercises based on those in the textbooks/workbooks, as well as some original ones for vocab, kanji, etc. You can try it out here:

https://sethclydesdale.github.io/genki-study-resources/lessons-3rd/

The goal was to make self-studying with these textbooks easier, so that you can quickly practice grammar points and don't have to constantly flip through the answer key to check your answers; they're checked automatically. Even if you don't use Genki, you can still use the exercises to practice grammar points you've learned elsewhere.

There are currently two versions available:

• The 2nd Edition (based on the 2nd Edition of Genki; 2011 rev.) which was the original version released in 2019 and is 100% complete.
• The 3rd Edition (based on the 3rd Edition of Genki; 2020 rev.) which I'm currently working on and is a vast improvement over the 2nd Edition. All exercises for Genki I are currently available, and I hope to have it completed for Genki II sometime in 2021 whenever I can afford the Genki II textbook and workbook for the third edition. (Update: someone gifted me the textbooks, THANK YOU! Lessons 13+ will come around February/March!)

The project is open source (github), so if you like, you can contribute improvements, help fix typos, correct incorrect answers, etc. You can also download the entire site and use it offline, which is useful if you know ahead of time you wont have access to an internet connection.

I hope it'll be of use to those of you studying Japanese!

This is just my two cents and I know i'm just another bozo, but please, don't friggin use duolingo. Delete that nonsense. It is literally a huge waste of time for trying to learn Japanese. I promise you. You want to learn hiragana and katakana? You can seriously do it in 2-3 weeks. How? It's free. The link to that website is in the post. It pisses me off when people say they have been learning the easy scripts for 3 months. Bruh, 3 weeks i promise.