Café Moof Library

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Most of the resources listed here I have personal experience with and can more or less vouch for. Background artwork by あるかとぴあ on Pixiv.

Learning the Kana

It is instrumental that learning the kana (i.e., hiragana & katakana) is the first thing you do after deciding to learn Japanese. These are two sets of 50-ish symbols each that represent the sounds Japanese syllables; as for why you need to know two symbols for each syllable: why do you need to know both 'A' and 'a'?

Put in an hour or more a day with any of the tools listed below and you will have them all memorized in a few days' time.

DJT Kana Itazuraneko Kana (Mirror via win95peko.github.io) Pretty much the same as DJT Kana above, but uses a dark theme. Real Kana More or less the same as the two above, but arguably less straightforward.

Guides

It is recommended that you pick one guide from each category and read it back-to-back without dwelling on the tougher concepts too much. After your first read-through, you can go back to revise (it will be easier to understand as you will have more familiarity with the language). If you find anything to be particularly complicated, reference a different guide.

Studying Japanese (and languages in general)

Itazuraneko (Mirror via win95peko.github.io) Original website has unfortunately been taken down due to copyright issues and general abandonment – most of the Mega links are dead, but the information is still all there. TheMoeWay Animecards Donkuri: Immersion-Based Japanese Learning

Grammar

Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (Itazuraneko Mirror via win95peko.github.io) Recommended over the original as it has everything on the same page. The content is the same. Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (Original Website) Imabi: Guided Japanese Mastery More in depth than Tae Kim but may be more difficult to grasp. Sakubi: Yesterday's Grammar Guide Short, sweet and to the point.

Common Japanese

Kuzuri Common mistakes and how to avoid making them. JLPT Grammar List Grammar & common expressions. Bunpro Grammar Reference

Anki

Anki is software designed to help you memorize things quickly through the process of spaced repetition. This is by far the most efficient and effective way of learning Japanese vocabulary.

I personally recommend getting the Core 2k/6k deck and going through it at a rate of 20 new cards/day in the beginning. Once you reach somewhere around 2000 cards (or whenever you start feeling like it's going too slow), bump it up to 50 new cards/day (but bear in mind that this also means more revisions).

Setup Guides

Itazuraneko (Mirror via win95peko.github.io) Animecards

Decks

Core 2k/6k Optimized Japanese Vocabulary Most common 6000 Japanese words. See here for adding images. Core 2.3k Similar to Core 2k/6k, with slight improvements and significantly less vocabulary. Bushu The components that all kanji consist of.

Dictionaries

Bilingual (E ⇆ J)

Jisho.org JPDB Yomiwa (Mobile App) Has Japanese glosses for most of the terms as well as Anki deck exporting function for saved words. Takoboto (Android App)

Monolingual (J → J)

Japanese Wiktionary Jitenon Kotobank Weblio Weblio Kogo For old Japanese

Other

YomiTan A pop-up dictionary extension for Chromium-based browsers: hover over a word and press a key to see what it means. It doesn't come with any dictionaries installed by default, but you can find a bunch here. JapBase A list of grammar points. (Warning: huge page.) [⚠ HTTP] The Jaded Network Though the site seems to have fallen into disrepair, this is the best onomatopoeia dictionary that I know of.

Miscellaneous

DeepL The best (though still far from perfect) machine translation for Japanese. Massif Example Japanese sentences (without English translations). Great for getting an idea of how specific words are used in actual Japanese. The sentences come from various light novels. Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Japanese Gigantic vocabulary frequency lists. Đề Thi Tiếng Nhật Past JLPT exam questions. Has a bunch of misspellings. Zi.Tools A Chinese website with an amazing character composition search engine. This is amazing for looking up characters based on their components, as well as looking into their history etc. National Diet Library Digital Collections If you ever want to look through old manuscripts. Make sure that only ログインなしで閲覧可能 is checked before searching. Google Translate Awful for translation, but it has the best handwriting recognition. Good for drawing characters you're not sure how else to look up.