For people who want to learn Japanese but don’t know how to start!
NOTE: This is not a post for resources. I mention some in this post, but you can find way more on posts like this or this. Also, keep in mind that these are just my personal opinions and methods. I tried many different things to get over that beginner hurdle, and I found that this method was most effective. Take away whatever you think will work best for you. Good luck!
1. Make some decisions
First, come up with a couple reasons why you want to learn Japanese. These reasons must be specific and meaningful enough to get you through those times of frustrations. Write them down somewhere.
Next, decide whether or not you want to learn how to handwrite. Handwriting is definitely important and can help in the learning process, but it isn’t completely necessary in this digital age. It takes time out of learning other aspects of the language, and you probably won’t handwrite too often anyway. It really just depends on what your goals are and your reasons for learning.
Lastly, figure out which areas you want to focus on: reading, writing, listening, or speaking (any combination of them or all of them), depending on your reasons for learning. If your main goal is to be able to read Japanese books, you’d obviously want to work more on reading, and if your main goal is to be able to communicate with Japanese people, you’d want to concentrate most on speaking or writing. As with any language, input (reading and listening) is going to be much easier than output (writing and speaking). Of course, focusing on all four will be the best option, but realistically, it will take much longer to master all of them at once compared to focusing on specific ones.
2. Learn hiragana and katakana
In my opinion, romaji (English spellings of Japanese) should not exist in any textbooks at all. The very first thing you should learn is Hiragana, the most basic writing system of the three, so you never have to rely on romaji. You can put off learning Katakana until a little later, but Katakana should be memorized fairly early on as well.
Here is a really good guide to Hiragana by Tofugu. They also have a guide for Katakana here. Use mnemonics! If you like to doodle, make up and draw your own mnemonics. This website is a good place to test yourself. There’s also this website.
For both, aim to be able to recall the character almost immediately after it pops up, in under 2 seconds. You want to be able to recognize them as well as you recognize ABC’s!