I’d advice myself to go back further in time and tell myself to start sooner.
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Made that mistake!! Wish the present me could’ve told past me that about 1.5 years ago 
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I wouldn’t really change anything other than tell myself to persevere and keep going.
There was a couple of years in high school I didn’t seriously study Japanese, but could’ve totally completed Wanikani and Bunpro in that time period.
The best time to start was then, but the second best time to start is now. - my water bottle
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I would tell myself not to bother with Anki and RTK. They helped me recognize and differentiate a lot of kanji (I was more than halfway through RTK when I started stalling and eventually quit) but if I had started WaniKani instead then I would have made much, much more progress by now. I’d probably actually have finished WK by this point.
My advice would probably be a bit more simple. Being a first-time language learner, I spent an unnecessary amount of time researching materials/resources (which is great because now I have a wealth of them), but that caused me to spend less time actually learning. I would tell myself to stop the perpetual cycle of preparation and just dive in.
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- Don’t do bunpro, wanikani, kamesame, kaniwani, lingQ, genki and kitsun at the same time. You’ll burn yourself out in a month (I lasted like 4 but yeah…)
- STOP RESEARCHING materials and just start
- Don’t neglect grammar
- Don’t bother with RTK
- Don’t try to master は and が before moving on…
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Watch Cure Dolly.
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Yeah too many things at once is hard. For RTK… Or any kanji method for that matter, my advice would be ‘Do it 100%, or not at all’.
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It would help if I could start by advising myself to properly learn English way earlier ^^
As for learning Japanese:
- Find a better goal than learning Japanese for the fun of it. (I tried to learn Japanese many times and gave up after a few weeks every time until I found a book that I want (yes, present, I’m still not reading it, see below :x) to read and that was not (at the time) officially translated (and the unofficial translation stopped). It’s been more than 2 years and I’m still going \o/)
- Learn かな, now and don’t even look at resources that want to “teach” you Japanese in ローマ字
- Learn 漢字. Yes, I know it’s hard but you will need them. Also, it will help you when you’ll live in China (even though you don’t yet know that you will go there
). Here’s an Anki deck (or “here is a WaniKani lifetime membership” if WK was already around 
) - Don’t limit yourself to 漢字, learn some vocab at the same time. (Still not doing that…)
- Japanese is definitively not like German or English, you won’t pick up the grammar without effort while having trouble with the vocabulary… Everything will be hard :x
- (Applies to me right now as well) Don’t stop watching アニメ, thinking that you will go back to them once you can read Japanese subtitles… Also, don’t let the books you’ll buy gather dust on the bookshelf, read them!
To be honest, that last one is the hardest because I love to immerse myself in the stories that I read but having to look up every other word doesn’t let me do it 
It would have been so much easier if I started learning Japanese properly when I was still a student (or better yet, a teenager…) instead of now, when I haven’t much time and feel like I need a new brain ^^’
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Agreed with all of the above. All of the highly recommended books, YouTubers, sites, etc - at the end of the day - teach the same material. Find something that works for you and roll with it.
For me, it’s Wanikani, Bunpro, and once a week I take a course (that uses Minna no Nihongo as the framework) with a native teacher to practice speaking, pronunciation, and also help with culture questions.
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Am I the only one taking that “one piece of advice” literally? xD
I imagine time travelling has to be expensive so I was keeping it short. Just 3 words xD
I do this as well, but I just learn the word most commonly associated with a particular kanji. Most kanji have at least one word that is associated with just the kanji itself (no added kana). But then again, kanji is a very personaly battle for most people. I think 10 different people would give you 10 different approaches.
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That’s definitely true 
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Skritter.
Actual writing kanji really embeds the knowledge into your head. I found by just reading kanji I never really learnt them. I could read them, but i’d have no idea how to begin to start writing them, so my knowledge of kanji wasn’t particular deep.
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It is first time I see this word. Any readings on it or videos you recommend?
I love kanji so I will for sure read it. 
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I couldn’t agree with this more. Since I started writing Kanji, my ability to recognize them has increased dramatically. I don’t use mnemonics at all, just writing and reciting the readings as I write.
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Thank you for this! I’ve been working more on actually writing kanji recently, because my recognition is pretty decent but I couldn’t reproduce it from memory if I tried. I’ve been spending spare deskwarming time working on it with good old pencil and paper and it’s been great so far, but it’s always good to have another weapon in my arsenal too!
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It’s a little on the expensive side, but it is completely worth the money. It is SRS (standard) and introduces new kanji with stroke order tracing to get familiar with it. Then it will test reading and definition familiarity, before moving on to reproduction, can you write it from memory? You can choose a number of different lists to study from, as well as kanji in isolation or in compounds or both.
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I personally prefer the pen and paper method (Having a stack of full notebooks of kanji feels like a tangible achievement). But I assume an app would be just as good, so long as you are still writing, even if it is just with your finger.
I can write about 1300 kanji from memory, with all of their readings. I know more from earlier attempts at learning kanji, but I can’t say I know them anywhere as well as the ones that I can write from memory. I almost never get those ones wrong anymore.
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yes it’s finger tracing. The big advantage i would argue an app has over pen and paper is portability. 5 minutes to kill at the train station? Skritter! Wife taking ages getting ready? Skritter! 12 hour long haul flight? Wine! then skritter
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