I’ve been attempting to learn some Japanese over the last couple of months, documenting my approach here. It can be adapted to any other language most likely.

My goals are primarily becoming capable of reading basic material and listening, so most output forms are non-goals for now.

To start, I got Assimil Japanese with Ease with the idea of doing one lesson per day for a bit over three months, but that turned out to be a bad start and I dropped it after a couple of weeks. Assimil method and books are very good, they have built-in spaced repetition system and get you up to speed with most language concepts very quickly, but the Japanese version has some quirks that make it uniquely bad. The biggest downside is that it doesn’t teach much vocabulary and doesn’t force you to remember kana and kanji because of copious use of romaji and even “pronunciation guide” in the earlier lessons which is their own, constructed transcription system, which is more of a hindrance than a help. It’s a good supplementary resource later down the line, not something I would start with. A remix book that removes all romaji would be great.

I also got Anki with the Kaishi 1.5k deck to get some practice in with remembering vocabulary. I decided against learning using a kanji-specific method like RTK (Heisig) or KanjiDamage because I figured that learning kanji in context and in vocabulary makes more sense - deriving understanding of individual characters from vocabulary rather than the other way around makes more sense to me in the long term. I look up particularly complex characters on jisho.org with the #kanji tag and it works all right.

For grammar I use the Cure Dolly Japanese from Scratch videos, which seem to me most comprehensible and easily understood. The form is a bit off-putting, but the content is unparalleled when it comes to beginner grammar guides. I also tried Tae Kim and Genki, but I bounced off them very quickly, while I get through the Cure Dolly material at a pretty steady pace. There is a written version of that guide available online as well, here. It reminds me very much of Language Transfer which I used previously to learn Greek grammar.

I also use Claude a lot to practice. A problem I came across with the Kaishi deck is that I would often recognise the kanji not from the characters themselves, but from the added context sentence, which was especially problematic for some related and complex characters. To remedy this somewhat I created a project on Claude which has all “seen” cards from Anki dumped into a txt file, and prompt Claude to do the following exercise:

You are provided a list of words that I should already know dumped from Anki in the file anki.txt. Your task is to prepare a short passage comprised of these words in Japanese - a short story or a dialogue. My task then is to retype these words in romaji to see if I understand them, and then also try to understand the translation of the paragraph.

This seems to work so far, and I think this approach would work pretty well for other languages.