Haven't been posting much because I kept myself busy doing a bunch of scattered projects and studying Japanese (now that I have some free time). Might as well leave here the resources I've used throughout my journey, as I never did and for the time being don't plan to enroll myself in any formal class (they cost a lot of money and learning Japanese is a hobby for me).

My interest in learning Japanese started many years ago, but I never managed to consistently study it for more than a month in a row, and the breaks would take many months, so while I probably started in 2018, if I only counted the days I effectively studied, it would probably be less than a year. It started mostly for my interest in anime, but it evolved into more than that (especially since I don't really watch anime nowadays), as I'm now much more passionate about linguistics and languages in general, and Japanese is a fascinating one to learn.

The obvious first step is to learn kana. The first step with any language is to learn their writing system. You don't learn Russian without learning Cyrillic first, you don't learn Korean without learning Hangul first, and you don't learn Japanese if you don't first learn hiragana.

I don't really have any major recommendation for learning hiragana and katakana, there's hundreds of resources and most of them work fine. The one I used was the one from JapanesePod which is a very corporate-like learning resource, which is as close to a textbook is for youtube videos in general, but I found their teaching of kana very good. They give you multiple fonts so you can see how a kana may be presented differently (the same way the letter a can look quite different depending on the font) and they give you mental images to help you memorize easier (I'll never forget the ones for ぬ for holding noodles and め for making a mess by dropping the noodles). Again, any other resource is probably fine if you don't like this one.

Once you learn kana you can start learning Japanese. When you're in the very early beginning, I suggest to not focus on only learning vocab, or only learning grammar, or only trying to immerse yourself in the language first. Doing everything at once is much better (at your own pace) as Japanese has a very different way to structure sentences than western languages (in contrast, Mandarin follows a much more similar structure, which makes reading sentences easier in the beginning when you know the vocab). A channel which I used in my early beginnings and to this day I think it's fantastic is JapaneseAmmo. She has playlists for absolute beginner grammar here, but back when I started, I learned through her older version which is currently more complete, and is found here.

For kanji, I tried multiple apps and websites, and I didn't use a single one way more than others, so I would be lying if I said I mostly used one resource. I learned that the way kanji is taught in schools in Japan is very systematic. 80 in first grade, 160 in second grade, etc. So what I first did is learn and memorize all first grade kanji. This is totally fine and it was very fun, but it's more productive to learn the simple and most frequent kanji first, something like the N5 kanji.

However, now that I'm learning non-beginner kanji, I'm realizing that there are many kanji which don't have a very "well-established simple meaning" on its own. They're usually way more frequently (or always) found as part of a compound-word than by itself, and so it's more productive to learn them within words, than trying to memorize them by themselves. That's one of the reasons wanikani or Heisig won't do for me (the price being a very important one too), and I'd rather use a system like jpdb which lets me prioritize learning words over individual kanji, and it does a fantastic job at showing you new kanji.

The way jpdb works is if your next word to be learned is 理由, it'll first teach you the components 王 and 里, then show you each kanji 理 and 由 so that you can more easily identify and memorize using mnemonics. What I always do is see if the kanji by itself has a simple established meaning, and if it doesn't (examples are 弁, 対) then I can customize the "meaning" by adding maybe the most common reading, or a better explanation of it. For example, when jpdb shows me the word "talent", and expect me to respond with a kanji, the "correct answer" is 才. This kanji is much more commonly seen within compound words like 天才 and 才能 (which mean "genius" and "talent", notice how the word for talent contain two kanji, so if you wanted me to tell which kanji corresponds to talent, I could wrongly assume you're talking about 能). Thus, to avoid wasting my brain power on corresponding 才 with "kanji for talent", I customized its meaning to "talent (サイ)". This way, I quickly see it wants me a kanji related to talent and is read as サイ, which I can quickly correspond to 才 as in 天才 (テンサイ).

I did try anki decks, but I never got used to anki. It's a bit primitive and simple, yet at the same very customizable and easy to use, so it just never appealed to me. On the other hand, jpdb has a more "intelligent system" for showing me new words, more visually appealing (I know, I'm shallow for saying that), and more user friendly with the customization, I've been much more consistent on that. But maybe it will be different for you, so definitely give anki at least one try.

I couldn't possibly write a blog post about good learning resources and not cite Cure Dolly. Addressing the elephant in the room, not much is known about the person who was behind Dolly, other than that she seems to have passed. I've seen complaints about the visuals and voice, but I find it charming and I can brush it off by changing the speed or adding subtitles for certain sections.

Dolly's videos are sometimes clickbait-y sounding, like those ads about "a miraculous antidote that makes you lose weight and doctors hate it!", but the actual Japanese lessons are very eye opening. She understands that the structure of a language is unique, and trying to explain Japanese grammar using English grammar leads to confusion and makes Japanese seem to have lots of irregularities or multiple meanings for the same thing. So perhaps a much better approach is to be open minded and try to learn Japanese structure as a thing on its own.

For example, in mathematics, to say that $x$ is an element of $y$, we write it as $x \in y$. And to say $x$ has some property, we often create a set $P$ of all elements that have this property, and then say $x \in P$. For example, to say $A$ is an open set, we denote $\tau$ as the collection of open sets and say $A \in \tau$. If we tried to apply English grammar to that sentence, we would say something like $\tau$ means "open" so $A \in \tau$ means "$A$ is open", so $\in$ can mean both "is an element of" or also the verb to be.

But that's a weird thing to do, especially because $\in$ has only one fundamental meaning. It's much more enlightening for a learner to understand that there is no way to say "$A$ is open" directly in mathematics because there is no concept of "the verb to be" or adjectives, so we have to rephrase it as "$A$ is an element of the collection of open sets", and now it makes total sense for $\in$ to be part of the sentence.

When you look at the plethora of youtube videos about what 「んです」means, you'll see that it's a "very flexible" word that is used in multiple contexts. For example, if you're giving an explanation to something, or you want to convey that there is more to what you're saying, or when you want to say "actually, ...", giving new information, making a statement feel more emotional, etc.

However, 「んです」is a contraction of 「のです」which is a formal version of「のだ」. の is often used to nominalize things, so a sentence like 「アニメを見る」(to watch anime) can become「アニメを見るの」to mean the act of watching anime. だ at the end changes the "class" of the sentence from "X does Y" to "X is Y", so のだ is very broadly the concept of "it's that...". So 「アニメを見るんです」would convey "it's that I watch anime", which conveys all those meanings above depending on context. Dolly has a video on this.

Naturally, Dolly won't cover every possible types of grammatical sentences and it's with pain that I say we won't receive any new videos from her. So if I ever need to look up grammar-related things that Dolly doesn't cover, my go-to is bunpro. It's a paid service if you want to use their learning system, but all the grammar "lessons" are free to look at, and they cover a lot of grammar concepts (and are still expanding).

The most problematic thing I'm doing here is treating Japanese like an abstract concept that I'm studying (like topology) and I'm not using the things I study into practice, like writing Japanese, doing conversations in Japanese, or watching things in Japanese and trying to understand them. I'm not alone on this, but I definitely must work on this issue soon. I'll keep you updated on that once I figure it out.