𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙹𝚒𝚗𝚔𝚕𝚎𝚛

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.

Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

Giger's biomechanical aesthetic managed to make even this humanoid entity look completely foreign to our world. It always looked to me like a midway point between a corpse and a motorcycle. And you definitely get the impression that it's only human shaped because it gestated in a human host.

Good News: Devils Hole Pupfish are Rebounding After a Dramatic Decline.

In response to earthquakes which caused limited food and a sharp population decline in 2025, the multiagency team, made up of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Nevada Department of Wildlife biologists, acted quickly and released a number of captive reared Devils Hole pupfish back to the wild. This action was instrumental in ensuring the wild population’s survival and was the first time that captive Devils Hole pupfish have been returned to the wild. Currently, the wild population is around 70, nearly double the numbers seen in 2025. Did you know: The Devils Hole pupfish is believed to have the smallest geographic distribution of any known vertebrate species? It exists in a single submerged cave system, Devils Hole, within Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. The depth of Devils Hole is unknown. Professional scuba divers from the National Park Service have mapped Devils Hole’s depth to nearly 500 feet, but the bottom has never been found.