Studying Japanese

So you've decided to start learning Japanese? Great! So, where do you start? Start here!

Getting Started
To get you up and running, it's best to start by learning the "kana" (かな). These are phonetic symbols that are part of the writing system of Japanese. Japanese writing is divided into three types: hiragana(ひらがな), katakana(カタカナ), and kanji(漢字). The kana are the simplest part of writing Japanese, and there are 48 each of hiragana and katakana. There are thousands of kanji, which will take years to master. So let's start with the kana!

Super beginner's site : Nihongo eな！

Learning the kana
Websites and information for learning the kana.
 * Jack Halpern (creator of the SKIP system for kanji lookup) has this very good page on kana.


 * Another source: Learning Hiragana


 * A bunch of カタカナ words - (In Japanese, includes meaning and description)

Learning the kanji (漢字)
Once you've mastered the kana, you will start the long journey of learning kanji.

First step to learning kanji

There is some controversy as to the effectiveness of what's known as "RTK". "RTK" is short for "Remembering the Kanji", a series written by James Heisig for learning over 3000 kanji. The controversy comes from Heisig's unconvential teaching method. Some swear by it, while others say it is a waste of time. Either way, it's worth checking out. There are ANKI decks available for RTK.

White Rabbit Press has good kanji flashcards.

Grammar (文法)
Read Tae Kim's grammar guide.

Vocabulary (語彙)
There's an Anki Deck called Core 2000/6000 that includes pictures, example sentences for each word and audio files for both the word and the example sentence.

It can be found here https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2353399735

In that page you'll also find the download links for the media files, if you use Anki 2 you need to locate your Anki folder in "My Documents", then enter your user folder (usually called User1) and into the collection.media folder, copy all the files, JUST THE FILES, NOT THE FOLDER HIERARCHY. Your media.collection folder should contain no subfolders at all.

- If you can't find the files or the links have expired, you can ask someone in the Facebook group to reupload them for you -

Textbooks (教科書)
Some of the popular textbooks are:

Genki(元気)

Youkoso(ようこそ)

Minna no nihongo (みんなの日本語)