I’m reading Tae Kim’s Guide and almost finishing the Essential Grammar, but I feel like I don’t get some forms and expressions, should I review some things or just keep going?
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If you start reading, everything in Tae Kim you didn’t quite understand will start to make sense as you see it used in real contexts. Then you can refer back to the guide as needed as you’re exposed to the grammar it covers (all of which will be very common in media) to help understand/cement it.
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I found it very helpful to stop using Bunpro and taking a break, while just using textbooks, as I noticed i was getting a big backlog of stuff to review, so I clearly didn’t really get it. Anyway, after spending some time away and just working through books and lots of reading, I came back, reset Bunpro, and suddenly all the grammar I was having problems with, was really easy. Just my two cents!
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it seems very helpful, any suggestions of what I should read?
Check out https://learnnatively.com/, it has books ranked by difficulty according to users. And reading will be extremely hard and time consuming at first (even the easiest stuff you can find), but it’ll get easier. Just so you’re prepared for that. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with understanding something here or in any other one of the many helpful Japanese learning communities if you’ve spent some time trying to figure it out and are still stumped.
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Any pick from the Absolute Beginner Bookclub on Wanikani. Every book comes with a club thread that’s full of beginner questions walking you through your first book.
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Hi @Ruan welcome to the forums! As you can see there are a lot of friendly and helpful people here.
It’s hard to give blanket advice, but I agree that starting to look for ways to expose yourself to Japanese outside of textbooks is a good start. Bunpro actually does a great job at this. I wouldn’t worry about going back and reading over and over again. I typically take some time every year to go back over the basics, starting with N5, because there is always something new to learn!
In regards to the books question.
I’m not totally sure what level you’re at, and everyone is different, but for me early on (really all the way through finishing N3 grammar), native content was just too difficult/discouraging for me, and I realized I was spending too much time trying to figure out what was being said (and if I went any faster, would miss important things, thinking I understood what was happening, but I was misunderstanding and developing some bad habits).
I would highly recommend looking into some graded readers aimed at a certain level. I know it’s not as rewarding as reading actual native content, but it’s a lot better time investment and is actually tailored to reinforce what you are learning at a given level.
A lot of people (myself included) have used Satori reader. It is a subscription program with a lot of really interesting and engaging stories in all different genres and lengths, with a lot of support for learners.
These may be ancient by now, and there may be better options, but I really enjoyed and found these two books titled “Japanese Stories for Beginners” on Amazon, very helpful. (I had originally posted the link, but it looked sloppy so I deleted)
There are a lot of people who are big into jumping into native content, and I wouldn’t outright discourage it by any means. However, it is probably going to be a big jump, and there are going to be a lot of things you don’t know, even with ‘easy’ or ‘entry level’ books. These books are still native material, with native cultural references and native slang. I even still have to look up things every now and then in some of these ‘easier’ books.
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For future reference, everything after the last slash in an Amazon link is just tracking stuff that can be omitted. You can also use the format [Your text here](https://website.com) to show “Your text here” as the link text: Japanese Stories for Beginners
I agree that graded readers are a good starting point, and many of the books under the early levels on Natively are graded readers and children’s books with super simple grammar and vocabulary.
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