Hi. I am brand new to this forum. I finished RTK1 in about 65 days a month ago. I used The edition 4 premade Anki deck, and made revisions where I saw fit. For me, this was a lot of effort and for the past month I have took learning Japanese rather easy. I have just continued to do RTK reviews and it has gotten to the point where it takes a very short amount of time to finish these. I have tried poking my head into various other forms of learning to increase vocab/grammar etc, ie manga, Japanese subbed anime, textbooks, but I am not very efficient and am terrible at making my own Anki Decks, and staying productive with these types of learning.

I am going to Tokyo in exactly a month from today, and want to become more adequate with speaking, vocab, grammar, etc in this month than I am currently. With RTK and premade decks, I was basically able to almost be spoon fed information and it helped me stay structured and productive. there is a bunch of different Anki premade decks for what I am looking to learn, but I don't know where I should start. My plan is to work very diligently for the next 30 days. Can someone tell me exactly what I should do next?

What I currently know:
-solid hiragana
-solid RTK1
-slightly less solid katakana
-some basic vocab, grammar, phrases etc

Also, because I don't know the reading for many kanji, being able to use a deck with mouse over furigana would be nice. I tried to get it to work today but had no success (even with non-mouse over furigana).

Thanks, and sorry if I didn't post this in the right place.

I think "the Japanese Language" is a better place to post this, going to repost this there

Check out the beginner's guide thread that's stickied in "The Japanese Language" board. It might give you some ideas.

There's a lot of different ways to do this. Rather than worry about which way is perfect (answer: none of them are), pick the one that seems the most useful go with it for now. You can always change it later. Since you only have one month, spend your time studying.

Keep in mind you're trying to develop 4 skills: Reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and they're all different. If you want to do them all, you need to be balanced in your approach.

If you like structure and spoon-feeding, I'd recommend Genki, because there are a lot of Anki decks based on it. Minna no Nihongo is a bit better, but you'd have to make your own decks.

Don't worry if you don't understand some bits. (はand が is famous for giving beginners trouble.) Find someone who can explain it for you-- it doesn't have to be a native speaker, but rather someone who is good at explaining Japanese grammar to students. I still use tutors, both online and locally on a regular basis. It saves a TON of time.

I was looking at core 2k/6k/10k, and downloaded deck with pictures/sound. Is this a good enough course of action? I am the type of person that is good at writing papers, but picking a topic can be hard for me. Over time, I have found that it is better to just pick a topic and go for it - the rest will fill it by itself. Also, for reference, I have been loosely following AJATT method (but came into problems when it comes to mining Japanese media for sentences because it inst structured enough), and I have pounded my skull full of Japanese music and audio for a long time so the spoken language is very natural and comfortable to me. I have access to friends on skype who are native speakers that at nice enough to answer questions I have about Japanese.

All the vocab in the world won't help you if you can't structure it coherently. That's the job of grammar.

Core does a good job with vocab, and the sentences are good practice for reading and seeing how grammar works, but you need to understand what the grammar means in the first place.

Japanese has a radically different grammar from English. (Postpositions vs. prepositions, verbs at the end, no definite/indefiinite articles, no difference between singular-plural noun forms, lots of degrees of politeness that change words, etc. etc.)

You need something to guide you through it all. It can be a textbook, a website, or a human, (or a combo of them) but it needs to be organized and coherent to *you.*

Look in the thread that Bokusenou suggested. It's full of good suggested resources. The ones a lot of people recommend are: Genki; Tae Kim's Website; some combo of the two, or a limitless number of others. Japanese the Manga Way (NOT Japanese in Mangaland) is a great book for beginners as a resource, too.

If there's a university nearby, check out their library, ask their faculty. They can be amazingly helpful if you ask nicely. I found some really useful materials that way, too.

Thanks for the reply. I know a lot of the basic grammar particles, and what they do, because I have read through some of Tae Kim's website in the past, and did like 1/3 of a textbook similar to genki (I stopped the textbook because it had too much romaji and I didn't feel like defacing the whole thing with a sharpie, despite the fact that I bought it for $8 used). Due to the AJATT method I have actually found a lot of grammar to be coming naturally when I make a guess on how to make a sentence come together. I am liking core so far, and will probably just do this and supplement things I don't know with grammar related resources (as you said, guides/books and other humans). Thanks for getting me on the right track guys and I am very glad I live in an age where something like Japanese can be given to you in such an easy and effortless way .