さすがたける！.jpg
[Hide] (220.2KB, 707x458) Some tips. I can read/listen to nip quite well, not that great at handwriting (even in English) and have never really had the opportunity to speak or practice speaking but I assume most beginners just care about the 'understanding' bits.
Tae Kim's grammar guide is the best to start out with. Free (piracy nonwithstanding), simple, starts you off with Kanji ASAP. It's not perfect and you probably won't remember everything after finishing it but that's fine. As long as you have a general idea on how sentences are structured by the end then you can just go back to look at it whenever you're confused on things.
I have very rarely, if ever, used grammar books like Genki. Anything that uses roumaji (japanese written in roman characters, it's the 'watashi wa same desu' to 私はサメです) is fucking useless. You should actively be trying to avoid using roumaji, it's one of the few things that will genuinely fuck you up.
After a look at a grammar guide, you can start reading and listening to stuff. Don't be afraid of doing it, it's definetly hard as hell and I had trouble reading 5 pages of Yotsubato when I was first starting out, but the more you do it the easier it'll get. At first, you can try just looking for new sentences/phrases/words and adding those onto what you'll learn with Anki. As for listening, listen even if you don't understand anything. Worst that can happen is that you get bored. I recommend watching things you've seen before with subs, or have a general notion of what the plot is, or just something where you wouldn't get bored if you didn't understand what was going on. Like Vtubers! Anime won't retard your speech because presumably you're not a manchild who unironically uses phrases in cartoons to talk to people.
Anki is a thing you should use, primarily for rote study of kanji and 'mining'. Having a bunch of premade decks isn't a very good idea since you'll be less emotionally attached to the phrases. If you know the context that a certain word was used in, and have that sentence, it'll stick in your memory much more clearly and will eventually become part of you. Just having the words in an anki deck seems convenient, but if you don't have any context to throw it around in it becomes a lot harder to remember shit. To this extent, I regularly used sentence cards, which are essentially 'sentence on the front, phrase and definition on the back'. I've seen a similar type of card used, I think it was called an audio card, which was the same thing but instead of a written sentence it'd just be the spoken sentence. While I haven't used it, I don't see anything wrong with it other than the possibility that a sentence you might have wasn't actually spoken, or that it's very damn annoying to get the audio for it. You'll probably either have a full audio deck, mixed deck, or just sentence cards deck as a result.
Kanji is tricky. There's basically two parts to every kanji, there's the kanji itself, how it's written, and what you might 'define' it as, and then there's all of the various contexts in which the kanji is used. The former helps you with writing them, the latter helps you with understanding them, reading them, knowing the words they appear in, etc. Fully separating kanji studies and reading is stupid and makes everything harder. Reading can easily help you understand kanji a lot more, which is very useful because Japanese is designed by retarded island dwellers who really think it's okay for a random character to be read in 5 different ways depending on context. For rote study, I've found RTK 1/3 to be the best. I don't really bother with the books, although there's no reason not to, I just use the Anki deck. 2 is just about reading the kanji which is redundant if you're reading by yourself and not very efficent.
If you're not very good at reading Kanji, which you probably aren't, then look for material with furigana in it. Furigana is the Japanese's answer to their dumbass writing system by simply telling you how Kanji is supposed to be read. Pic related. If you ever have a question about why Japanese is fucking stupid then just tell yourself 'Oh right, it's Japan' and move on, because getting upset over every little thing isn't very efficent. A surprising amount of manga has furigana in it, and you can also use listening material to help with reading.
Speaking is something I find difficult because of anxiety. If anyone has any good ideas on how to practice it, let me know. thangg you for comingg 2 ted talk :DD
Also duolingo is shit. You can keep using it if you want but I personally despise it. I will not stand for the vtuber conspiracy to make everyone use duolingo to convince themselves through hippie placebo that they are learning a language.