you can do whatever you want. you can jump into native material if you want. there is rikai-chan and japanese subtitles and whatnot.

To be more specific - in my case, I dove into NHK News Web Easy, 童話 (on this site - http://hukumusume.com/douwa/), nanapi (http://nanapi.jp/), and other random articles I found on the Internet about anime and other subjects that intrigued me. That material drove my vocab SRS deck. If an article felt too hard for the time being, I set it aside for a later date.

If you want something more graded, you might consider LingQ (http://lingq.com), which has an abundance of audio+text articles in Japanese categorized by level. I don't use it anymore, but it's a good system, esp. if you're just starting out.

Onara wrote:

What do people normally do after they finish tae kims grammar guide (book or pdf or whatever version)?

Depends on what they started with, and what their goals are.  If tae kims grammar is the only thing you've done, I'd build up a vocabulary base.  Core 2k/6k is a pretty easy way to do that.  Also, if you haven't started on kanji, youll want to do that as well.

For Kanji I actually use "Essential Kanji" by P.G. O'Neill, as it doubles as a learning system as well.  A lot like RTK, it puts kanji in an order that makes sense for the brain.  Otherwise, use RTK, or whatever you want to learn with.  The only reason I dont like RTK is because it tackles readings too late for me.  I like all that stuff up front.

You can do vocab and kanji simultaneously btw.  I usually do 20 words and 20 kanji per day.

amtrack wrote:

You can do vocab and kanji simultaneously btw.  I usually do 20 words and 20 kanji per day.

Skritter is also a good option for this, and has the added benefit that it has you produce the kanji through writing (like Heisig does). If you do RTK, Skritter also incorporates Heisig keywords and hints.

jordan3311 wrote:

Sorry to interrupt I had a question. When reading is it important to keep reading and not worry about things that you don't understand. That's the problem I keep have when I read something I run into words I don't understand. Is it better to just keep reading and come back or stop and write what I don't know down.

It really depends on your tolerance for ambiguity, and on how much you already know. When I first started out, I looked up everything, because nearly everything was new. Now that I have a decent vocabulary, I tend to stop and SRS something only occasionally. The more words and grammar you know, the easier it becomes to pick words up from context.