Learning Japanese for free

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If you're interesting in learning Japanese, but unsure where to even start since there's so many learning materials out there then let me tell you how I learned. This is a self taught method and no purchases of any kind is required. Since it is self taught the effectiveness and speed of this method will depend on how discipline you are with yourself. A little bit of learning everyday will need to be part of your routine so be sure to do what works for you to remember to go learn!

First you need a Japanese guide. There's lots of books and online sites on learning Japanese, but the best I've found is Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. There are two guides there one is a complete guide which is good for beginners. This guide will tell you about the writing system and basics of the Japanese language. The second guide is the grammar guide which will teach you basic, essential, and advance grammar. Why do I think this guide is the best? I've read a few Japanese learning books, and none has really made a more accurate and understandable way of learning Japanese than Tae Kim's guide. The guides on the website is completely free though you can buy the guide book and the ios app is free. BunPro is a good browser flashcard site on just grammar. This will help you learn grammar in a bit more detail.

Now the second thing you need to to build your vocabulary. This will be done in the form of flash cards. There are a number of kanji learning apps and sites, but here's a few that I use and like. One is Memrise and you just need to sign up and add the JLPT vocab starting with N5 and going down. This goes through each word with audio, hiragana/katakana spelling, kanji, and definition. It will test your listening, definition, and writing skills on each word too which helps make the word stick better. WaniKani is a browser flashcard vocab program thats more in detail than Memrise as it makes you go through learning radicals, kanji, and vocab. Third is a flashcard program you can install. You will need a flash card program called Anki which is a totally free and reputable software. Once you have it installed, open it and click on the "Get Shared" button on the bottom. This will open up a new page on your browser to Anki's shared flashcard decks. Click on Japanese to get a list of Japanese cards. There's a lot but the ones you need are called "Japanese Core 2000 Listening Sentence Vocab + Images" and there are 10 steps in total. Its up to you if you want to download all 10 at once or not. They are scattered in the list so ctrl+F to find them faster. Each step is about 20MB big. Click the green download button and it will open up in the Anki program automatically. Now you can start learning! Whats great about this card deck is that it teaches you words and not individual Kanji. Each word has 5 cards: word listening, Japanese word reading, English meaning, Sentence listening, and sentence reading. There are images and voices to go along with these cards. It is a very thorough study of one word which is very helpful and quick way to learn Japanese. There is a Anki app for mobile but it has a hefty price of $25! Yikes!

If you need a Japanese dictionary Denshi Jisho is the best place for it. There's no app or offline option for it, but right on the front page are information on mobile use of the dictionary including a bookmarklet. If you want an offline mobile dictionary app the best I have used is Japanese but has a expensive price of $7.99. There's Midori which is even more expensive at the price of $9.99! I haven't used Midori so I can't anything about it. Imiwa is the best free dictionary there is. I have been liking it so far since it will automatically analyze words and sentences if you copy them. Its not designed the best, but you can also see the verbs conjugated and translated under "meaning" so its a pretty useful app to learn more than just words but also reading comprehension. Google Translate app is also a useful tool in that it has the ability to recognize text in photos and images. The translation part is always going to be wonky if the sentence is long. Its good enough for simple and short sentences. You can copy the text and put it into Imiwa for better understand.

Want to have immediate Japanese translation while browsing sites? Download the Rikaichan firefox addon! Its an extremely helpful addon that shows the dictionary results of Japanese words when you hover your mouse over them. Want it on Chrome? Search for Rikaikun!

Hope this helps and good luck!