Hi all, Can anyone with more experience recommend me how to continue my self learning.
The things I have done:
-Learn a basic grammar. (the most important from Genki but long time ago)
-Reached 2000 from the 6k deck.

Plan to do:
-review 100 words each day and very few new 5-10 so I can master in full the 2k as i have a bunch of words with the meaning or the reading not mastered.
In that review which will be like 2-3 months I will add very slowly new words and I want to start practice with something. So please recommend me something on my level? (Keep in mind that most of my free time are in the public buses so no huge textbooks please )))

I would supplement it with watching anime or jdrama. With or without subs. Since your Japanese is still very basic, chances are you won't be able to understand much at all without subs so I think keeping them on would be ok. Try turning them off after you review the 2k maybe although you might want to get further into the Core deck first.

You could also try listening to japanesepod101 podcasts at whatever level you think is appropriate. If you're looking for reading.. if you have Wakaru for iOS, it can sort the Aozora Bunko free texts by difficulty level according to the kanji and it's pretty accurate. I personally would do the listening since I like anime and jdrama a lot and that's basically the reason I'm studying Japanese anyway.

kraemder Wrote:I would supplement it with watching anime or jdrama. With or without subs. Since your Japanese is still very basic, chances are you won't be able to understand much at all without subs so I think keeping them on would be ok. Try turning them off after you review the 2k maybe although you might want to get further into the Core deck first.

You could also try listening to japanesepod101 podcasts at whatever level you think is appropriate. If you're looking for reading.. if you have Wakaru for iOS, it can sort the Aozora Bunko free texts by difficulty level according to the kanji and it's pretty accurate. I personally would do the listening since I like anime and jdrama a lot and that's basically the reason I'm studying Japanese anyway.

Is there any way to sort it through difficulty on the website? I haven't touched it much because it's a big confusing mess to me.

I'd recommend studying more grammar, either tae kim or imabi are good online sources.
I'd also recommend japanesepod101.com as well. Their lessons are set up horribly though because they have a ton of content and basically no guidelines on what you should do with it all. Juststart with Newbie Seasons 2 & 3, then move to Beginner Seasons 4,5,6.
I think most of the aozora bunko stuff is likely too difficult for you at this point, and I found most of it uninteresting anyways.

2k words is about half as much as you probably need to read the simplest, easiest novel in Japanese (I mean, I'm sure you can get through anything by brute-forcing it with a dictionary, but that's ... dumb). There's some manga that you can probably manage though - look for simple high-school drama/romance kind of stuff.

caffeine

Erin's Challenge is a really good thing to work on at your level. Videos and exercises, you can do some vocab building, read along with the videos to improve both reading and listening comprehension. The grammar points are not much but good reinforcement I suppose.
https://www.erin.ne.jp/

If you want to read native materials, the Yotsuba (よつばと！) manga series is quite nearly manageable, though it has some challenges (the occasional hard word is easily looked up, but there's a few slang expressions and some odd spellings that are meant to be 'obvious' mispronunciations of a 5-year old's speech... but not so obvious to the foreign reader perhaps.) Those kinds of challenges exist in every manga though, and are less here than in most.

If you're more inclined to serious materials, try working with NHK news easy, http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ ; simplified versions of the news with links to the full article. The articles are written in a very textbook style, and have some pretty long and complex sentences - but they do phrase things with a lot more clarity and a few uncommon kanji compounds. Difficult expressions are often defined in parenthetical explanations.





You could also look into graded readers. I don't have a lot of experience with them, but they seem promising.