漢検ワーゲンを呼んで下さい！

Writing 順風順水順財神 with two brushes: "Wishing everything (life, work, making money) goes well".

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.

猫👈🏻 this is the Japanese Kanji for Cat

Both of them together 熊猫 is Bear Cat.

Can you guess what this is in English?

Hint below the cut!

An archaic variant today! The surname 國岡 is read Kunioka, and it belongs to only about 190 people, BUT, with a simpler kanji, 国岡 belongs to about 1400.

國 means country, nation, or state. It's read くに or コク. The radicals are 囗 enclosure, 戈 halberd, and 口 mouth (if two of those look indistinguishable, that's okay).

国 has the same meanings and readings as 國. They are relatively interchangeable, but 國 is used almost exclusively in proper nouns. The other difference is the radicals inside 囗 enclosure, which are 王 king, and 丶 dot.

アレルギー: allergy (ger: Allergie)

アトピー: atopic; predisposition toward allergies

アレルギー症状/アレルギーしょうじょう [アレルギーしょうじょう] allergy symptoms

ナッツアレルギー: nut allergy

食物アレルギー[しょくもつアレルギー]food allergy

ペニシリンアレルギー: penicillin allergy

アレルフリー: allergy-free

wait what-