When you see honorifics, run away 
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- Use good SRS like anki decks for vocabulary
- Do grammar on bunpro and fill your anki vocabulary deck with new words
- Do it now and not 10 years later
God I wish I knew about SRS when I was still in school and had more free time, it’s basically legitimate cheats
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You’re at that age now where you have to slowly learn vocabulary and practise your grammar daily… 
Also, taking two weekly classroom courses is a really good idea. This is your passion now, follow it!
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Don’t be afraid to go into native content. For too long I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go into it and that it would be a struggle. Yes it’s true, it’s difficult but I have improved so much because of it. In a year and 4 months time I have gone from not being able to read many things from NHK News to Yotsuba to being able to read manga, and play games such as Persona 5 (admittedly it’s a challenge). If you ever feel like you are not sure just go for it. It’s important to try! It made me so much more interested in the language when I would recognise similar grammar or vocabulary that I already learned or saw.
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Persona 5 uses lots on non-joyou kanji, so I feel the struggle! Hahah. The first time I saw 淹れる I was like ‘why is this not jouyou… It’s so common’
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I think this thread got too many answers and needs a wiki or an aggregation of some sort to make it bearable and useful to newcomers.
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Don’t you dare thinking that avoiding BunPro and WaniKani will save you a lot of money. It won’t. But using them will save you a lot of nerve cells LOL That’s what I’d say to myself. Because after a year of studies with books and teachers only I’ve just started SRS thingies (yeah, call it a new year resolution or whatnot), and I’ve already noticed that I’m getting out of the “already-not-a-beginner-but-still-not-an-intermediate” slump…
So yeah, that’s probably it 
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There are too many varying opinions for it to be useful for a beginner haha. Ideally you could sort by the amount of likes a post has, potentially bringing more useful answers to the top, but that is a bit beyond Disqus capabilities… From what I know.
It’s better to think of the posts as people sharing their struggles, and what helped them break through it, rather than advice to others. We all struggle with different things, so naturally the answers will be wildly different.
On the bright side, you are posting in the Bunpro forums, which I guess means that you are a Bunpro user. That in itself, would be my biggest tip to anyone. Use Bunpro 
.
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I’ve been playing 街 on and off for over a year now. I’m pretty sure that game’s writers set out to use every kanji ever! It took me the better part of an hour to look up 瀟洒; that second symbol looks like 酒 but turned out to be missing one stroke, and I didn’t notice until Google finally corrected me.
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Study grammar, and words that don’t use kanji. Don’t focus too much on wanikani.
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DROP DUOLINGO, LINGODEER, ETC in the TRASH. Get Anki decks. Use Anki for vocab (it’s spaced repetition, and it works.) LEARN PLAIN (Dictionary) FORM OF VERBS AND ADJECTIVES FIRST. Before you learn ANY polite speech or conjugation. Stop rushing. You won’t die tomorrow (hopefully). BUNPRO for grammar. Use Youtube for further explanation of grammar after learning a new point, and to hear real people speak sentences. Not recordings that are meant to demonstrate perfect pronunciation. You need to hear natural, local dialogue, with natural emotion. Study everyday for at least an hour even if you don’t want to. It makes a difference. 1 hour won’t kill you.
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To High school me: class is not the goal. Here is anki. (RTK deck and All genki vocab deck) The goal is to learn Japanenes, not pass the test. It’s called “self study”. Now turn off those English subtitles on Netflix and do your best! Also, that was back in the hey day of “All Japanese All The Time”.
College me: More listening practice! And, unfortunately, reading along is still reading. Turn off those Japanese subtitles.
Don’t stop studing after passing N5! Join a tea circle or anime club or something besides playing on your phone and actually make friends. This would’ve been a good time to buy Jalup or Bunpro if it exists I think Subs 2 srs was created around this time.(2015?)
First Job: Your job is boring, and your boyfriend is worse. Join a club or networking events to find new ones. And listen to Japanese podcasts at work. Hustle is a lie.
To me now: the road to hell is paved with “about” you spent the last /hour/ giving Japanese advice when you have 200 reviews due!
Do your SRS then go watch a Japanese Lets Play on YouTube. Shoo!
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(Oh Sweet. I found such a thing on Reddit. Parentheses are my own thoughts and not compiled from Reddit)
Advice:
Step 1: lea ひらがな and カタカナ
Step 2: go through kanji Damage (the one I used), RTK or Wanikani any kanji app until you feel stuck. Learn 5 to 10 kanji a day.
Step 3: 50% of your time to Japanese fun. Play a Japanese phone game, watch Netflix/YouTube in Japanese. You won’t understand. The important part is it is fun
Step 4: go through ATJ Kanji transition (the one I used) or https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782
Or
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552
For vocab
Step 5: go through the genki Textbook, 5 pages a week. Do the work book exercises one week later to practice remembering (If you are using Bunpro, replace work book exercises with Bunpro)
Your vocab should be ahead of genki (or Bunpro) so you know all the vocab words in the Example sentences
At this point you would be N4, or as much Japanese as a Japanese Major in college. Getting to this level took the author (and me) 3 years. If you actually are taking the N4 do Kaizen Master and old JLPT tests to practice test taking specificly
Step 6
Now your 50% of ‘study time’ is spent looking up new words you come a cross while reading Japanese. In a Japanese dictionary.
The r/LearnJapanese guide cautions you to not add to many vocab words. Ask yourself “is this word important to me” before you put it in anki
And when making this transition
If you understand 80% of the words, it /feels/ like you understand nothing at all
95% of the words and you got a 50/50 shot at answering multiple choice reading comprehension questions.
98% of the vocab before you pass reading comprehension test.
(There’s 30 links next of where to practice reading and listening to Japanese. I used https://animecards.site/ guide in conjunction with tazumoto ren’s on how to add sentences from anime which is free and Item Store - Japanese Level Up which costs $300 for 9,000 Example sentences with definitions written in Japanese and the first few chapters of 30 manga with native Audio. )
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My advice to myself would be to stop studying and restudying things you already know to get them “perfect”. The me from ten years ago all the way to 2022 wasted such a colossal amount of time on that, it is unbelievable.
Now I keep moving forward even when things are shaky. The key is just not to be scared.
You’ll confirm the stuff you’re shaky on later. I promise.
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Now I’m somewhat far kinda in my journey (though not great at reading yet unfortunately) , my advice to myself would be stay calm. I always was motivated but constantly angry whilst studying lol. If I just was able to stay composed and know I’ll get somewhere, it would have been much easier of a journey in Japanese.
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Anger sure is a nasty manifestation of anxiety, I’d know. It can be like that, you start out bright eyed and bushy tailed, and then the “oh no… when will I actually GET somewhere?” sinks in.
I could’ve done to be kinder to myself as well, given that learning Japanese as a monolingual English speaker is a long way off learning something like Italian, and it’s normal to take longer with it (much longer).
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TLDR: Be consistent every day; 5 minutes is better than nothing. Kanji is important but general frequency vocab lists can help progress EVERY aspect of learning because without the vocab, learning grammar is harder. Don’t be afraid to fail, and if you are fail early.
I would have told myself to keep going and try not to take such long breaks between studying streaks. There was a 2-3 year gap where I did nothing. You don’t know just how much you don’t know until you come across it but even doing 1% of effort every day will land you in a place 30% better in a month.
After kana, I initially focused on kanji and worked on it heavily while basically ignoring grammar apart from half the Genki I book and general vocab. I got to level 10 in Wanikani three times because I kept reverting levels due to 600+ review queues. I didn’t think to study vocabulary outside of WK like specific N5 lists or just the general top 2k words. Instead of speeding through levels it would have been better to do the radicals, kanji, and vocab for the current level before moving on. It also helped to solidify the kanji’s meaning and readings for that level too.
When I first started Bunpro, I didn’t have as much vocab as I thought. So instead of learning the grammar in the example sentences and how it worked with everything else I had to figure out and learn the entire sentence at the same time. It slowed down my understanding of the foundational N5 grammar points to where I stopped learning new grammar. Cure Dolly also helped immensely.
Lastly, fail early and don’t be afraid to do so. I taught English in Japan for 9 months and on my first day, being picked up at the airport by my boss/landlord and her two kids (4f and 6m) I accidentally said さわてください instead of すわてください which is basically “please touch [me]” instead of “please sit down” to her daughter in the car. Figured nothing could be worse. We had a good laugh.
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use speed focus add on for anki to make reviews faster. making anki reviews take less than 6 seconds per card rather than over 10 speeds up reviews so much. Its pretty easy to getting used to answering anki cards quickly, and its ok to fail cards more often as long as you do it quickly
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I first started in high school in the 90s, so I didn’t have a huge number of options anyway. There was no way I was going to learn plain form first or do any real immersion practice. But I wish I’d spent more time talking to teachers/professors outside of class and asked for extra/individual practice. Now I’m paying money on italki for what they would’ve given me for free.
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I’d tell myself not to spend so much time trying to figure out the ‘perfect’ method for language learning. Everyone has their own opinions and what works for you is different to what works for others. It is time wasted that you could spend on actually learning and using the language.
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