I don’t want to pile up as the OP made their feelings about kanji clear and I believe that there’s no universal goal or one size fits all approach to getting there. Also, you can always change your approach at any point if you feel like it. But be mindful of learning chinese compound words along the way. In my experience whenever I met someone who chose the minimal kanji approach is their vocabulary of jukugo being very limited and a strong vocabulary can take many years to build. Good luck!
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No, not at all.
I can learn anything I want in anyway I want and I’m bored of people gatekeeping stuff. Surely you have better things to do than sending pointless posts in a board right?
Wow, such a funny guy. Thanks for wasting my time.
Sounds like you might appreciate the Japanese: The Spoken Language book series (be sure to get both the main book plus the question and answer supplement for each):
It’s all in Romaji, and focuses entirely on speaking and grammar.
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Additionally, here is a bunch of supplementary material for Japanese: The Spoken Language on this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/DustinBrantley/featured
This is a good suggestion! My college Japanese class used Japanese: The Spoken Language and the grammar lessons are pretty comprehensive. When I started learning Japanese again several years later, I used Genki 1 and 2 instead because I wanted to integrate more kanji into my learning, so I’ve used both grammar series books. If you went through Genki 1 and 2, then Parts 1 and 2 will be mostly familiar with a few new things here and there, and part 3 will be mostly new to you. However, the listening comprehension recordings for Japanese: The Spoken Language are absolutely terrible quality and difficult to understand. The MP3 recordings for Genki and the supplemental workbooks were much better.
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Atleast your one of few who realized that i m funny. Ur welcome my good Sir.
You may find the Shadowing: Let’s Speak Japanese! books useful too, if speaking is your focus. If I’m remembering correctly it does have kanji, but I think it also has the romaji. If not, you can probably pick up from the audio anyway, furigana it in yourself etc.
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I have both the beginner and intermediate ones (of 日本語を話そう！) in front of me right now and neither has romaji. The beginner one has full furigana, it seems, and the intermediate one has furigana the first time the kanji comes up only (I think just for that particular section/unit/sentence or something like that). It obviously has full audio so between that and the furigana I think it is perfectly suitable for beginners still.
They both have rough translations into English, Chinese (not sure which language but presumably Mandarin), and Korean as well as explanatory notes for grammar/phrases in each of those languages as well. Obviously it is better if you understand why it is translated the way it is, which may be harder for a beginner, but it is still there if it is needed.
I just received the books like yesterday so haven’t used them yet. I’m in a different situation to the OP as I am a bit more advanced but if I remember then once I have been using these books for a few weeks I might add a follow-up note in this thread about how useful I found them.
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Thanks for the suggestions, I will look into all of them. I can read furigana, actually when I read stuff in romaji it is harder for me to understand for some reason.
I’ve also found a book called “Modern Japanese Grammar”, it’s nice if someone is interested. Uses little too much “grammar words” though so its explanations are somewhat hard to understand sometimes.
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