Japanese Learning Resources
This is a mostly scattered collection of sites, tooling, and all kind of things that can help you learn Japanese.
Comprehensive Guides
This site’s very own Japanese Learning Loop
Textbooks
Genki
The go-to de-facto textbook for Japanese beginners that want to learn in a classroom-like setting with structured lessons and workbook exercises.
Pretty much everyone will tell you to get Genki if you want to start learning Japanese. Personally, I’m not a big fan and I prefer the Japanese for Busy People series, however I seem to be in the minority.
Japanese For Busy People
Another textbook like Genki with a classroom-like lesson structure. It covers about the same topics as Genki, and personally it’s what I’ve used myself. I would recommend it over Genki as I found it to have a better format, but overall they are very similar. Get the kana version, don’t even bother with the romaji one(Japanese writing systems).
Japanese the Manga Way
This textbook is very interesting to me. It attempts to provide some kind of crash course to Japanese grammar by real world examples of manga snippets. It’s great for beginners and covers a surprisingly large amount of grammar condensed into a relatively low number of pages. I used it mostly to learn basic particles and sentence structure as a beginner and it carried me a long way, surprisingly.
An Introduction to Modern Japanese
Relatively old (2004?) and hard to come by textbook. I include it here because albeit extremely expensive for what it’s worth and hard to find online, it provides a very “different” approach to modern Japanese learning practices. The book itself is very intensive and is not afraid to jump into complex Japanese from the get go, every chapter is introduced with a quite meaty block of conversation/text to immerse in. No furigana, extensive use of kanji. It definitely does not hold a beginner’s hand through its material, but I found it to be very interesting and appreciated it for what it is.
Definitely not essential, but if you can get your hands on a copy as a side read it can be quite an experience.
Tobira
Following Genki, this seems to be the de-facto material to use. I see this being recommended every time after someone finishes with their Genki studies, although I have never tried it myself.
Grammar
Yokubi
A re-write of sakubi written by yours truly. It has a very hands on approach. It is similar to Tae Kim with the difference that it’s much more brisk and straight to the point. The main core of the guide is to get you to become aware of certain grammar structures and sentence style so you can become more independent and start reading as early as possible without getting stuck on overly complex explanations or textbook exercises. It’s not for everybody but it really resonates strongly with me and I think it’s a good idea to read over it at least once.
Imabi
This site is crazy. There’s pretty much everything you may want to know about the Japanese language grammar.
However, it’s extremely verbose and can be very confusing/convoluted in the explanations even for the simplest grammatical concepts. It’s great to look up individual grammar points if you want to get the finer intricacies and subtleties of the language, but I wouldn’t use it as a textbook alone.
Tae Kim
Often proclaimed as the entry point to learn Japanese grammar for beginners. I personally haven’t used it much and I’ve read a lot of criticism about the way he approaches some explanations (sometimes even incorrectly). Overall, it seems to work really well for a lot of people so it must be doing some things right at least.
An Introduction to Japanese
Probably one of my favorite grammar overviews of the Japanese language when it comes to information density and format. It’s great for looking up structure and grammar to get a thorough mental map of how some aspects of the Japanese language works.
It is not to be used as a beginner resource or as a learning textbook. I like to re-read it once in a while as my language knowledge improves to further cement the fundamentals and broaden my understanding.
Just note that it’s been written by a non native and I’ve actually found a few inaccuracies or incorrect statements here and there. It’s not a big deal but just be aware of it and don’t get too attached to everything that’s written there.
Cure Dolly’s Video Series
While I am not a fan of the video format and the way Dolly speaks, she has a lot of content out there that a lot of people seem to enjoy, so maybe it’s worth it giving it a look. A big disclaimer is that there are quite a bit of inaccuracies and explanations that don’t quite match how Japanese actually works. They might be white lies for beginners, which is not entirely a bad thing, but some stuff can be a bit puzzling.
If it works well for you, by all means use it to learn Japanese, but be careful not to take everything she says at face value and be ready to re-adjust your assessment of the language in the future as you improve.
A dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar
These three books are exactly what the name implies. A literal dictionary of all possible grammar points in the Japanese language. Use them to look up individual grammar points, they are really good.
I believe if anyone is even remotely serious about learning the language, these are absolutely essential to have. I prefer them on paper but there are digital version too.
A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns
This book is the complementary of the dictionaries of Japanese grammar mentioned above. It is a very hands-on dictionary-like approach to a huge number of various Japanese grammar patterns. Integrating both of them together provides you with an almost 100% coverage of all Japanese grammar points. The explanations are very extensive with plenty of examples too. If you are feeling confident in your Japanese abilities, there’s also a Japanese version (the original I think) which I would recommend as it is how this index was meant to be experienced.
To be honest I prefer this over the dictionary of basic/intermetdiate/advanced Japanese grammar mentioned above, but if you get both it’s even better.
Useful Sites to Bookmark
Core6000 Neocities’s and Itazuraneko’s aggregates
This is not a single resource per-se, but they are aggregates/index lists of all the dictionaries of japanese grammar and handbook of japanese grammar patterns entries (mentioned above) into a single place for easy browsing. If you could only bookmark and save a single website, either one of these would be it. This is really almost all you’ll ever need.
Japanese Counter Index
This site has a list of various counters to look up based on what words you need to count. It’s a very useful resource to have at hand.
The Jaded Network SFX
Amazing website to look up onomatopoeias and onomatopoeic words. It is unfortunately unmaintained and very old. If it breaks for you, make sure you are accessing the site using http instead of https.
jpdb
Very interesting project, it tries to be some kind of Japanese-learning/study tool, but where it really shines in my opinion is the curated and well maintained list of novels, visual novels, anime, etc sorted by complexity and word frequency. It lets you create your own decks, export to anki, and a bunch of other fancy stuff.
massif
Sentence search over a corpus of a lot of light novels written on narou. Very useful if you want to look for certain phrases to see if something is common or how a word is used in context.
Apps
Anki
Self-explanatory, just read the linked page.
Wanikani
I have personally never used it myself, so I can’t give a personal opinion on it. However, I know plenty of people that vouch for it as a really good alternative to RTK/Core anki decks both for kanji learning and for core vocabulary SRS practice. It is a paid resource though, so be aware of that, but it seems worth it. If I were starting from scratch myself now I’d probably give it a go.
Bunpro
Another paid resource. Bunpro in my opinion does an excellent job at grouping up all (most?) grammar by JLPT levels and providing you a somewhat clear study path depending on what textbook you are following (or you are free to build your own study plan too). You can just look up grammar points you come across in your studies and add them to reviews, and you will be drilled SRS style every day on them. Some sentences and English hints are a bit awkward and it won’t give you a comprehensive explanation of the grammar patterns, but overall it is more useful than it is not and I would personally recommend it even for more intermediate learners.
If you’re interested, I recommend reading how I approach studying with bunpro at Fitting Bunpro in your study routine#.
Yomitan
This is a must-have browser extension. It tells you how words are read and what they mean with dictionary definition as you move your mouse cursor over them in your browser.
