First, you should be clear what your goal is. "Learning Japanese" is ambiguous. For example, I know many people who passed the JLPT N1 exam, but cannot have a s

First, you should be clear what your goal is. "Learning Japanese" is ambiguous. For example, I know many people who passed the JLPT N1 exam, but cannot have a simple conversation with a native and have a horrible accent nobody can understand. It's clear they've just "hacked" the exam by memorizing stuff. And that's totally fine if that's the goal to e.g. get a job or a visa. And I know people who are absolutely fluent in conversation, but would never pass an N3 exam and cannot read simple articles. My point is that these are very different skills that need a different approach. What do you want? What is your end goal? Then, everyone learns differently, so there are no generic "best resources". I don't know if this works for you, but I can tell you what worked for me. For each of the step below, use Anki [0] or any other SRS system to memorize things. 1. Start with a formal textbook like Elementary Japanese (that's what I used) or Genki. This will give you a curriculum for the basics and you don't need to worry about what to learn next. Simply following these textbooks will bring you to a lower intermediate level (JLPT N4 to N3). 2. Do something like "Remember the Kanji" [1] to memorize more characters and get a feeling for them. There are many variations on this you can Google. You can do this in parallel with step 1 too. Learning Kanji in isolation is IMO overrated and not super useful, but just having the familiarity will pay dividends later. 3. This IMO is the tough part. You are now ~lower-intermediate level. You are past beginner books, but probably not good enough to read real-world stuff. For me, it was a mix of resources here. Find people to practice with, listen to podcasts like JapanesePod, read more advanced textbooks, read some online websites you are interested in, etc. I don't have a good answer on how to get past this level. Also, if your goal is to speak conversational JP you really need to talk to people here because so far you've only read textbooks. 4. Once you get to something like ~N2 Level, just immerse yourself while you keep adding stuff to Anki. Do you like videogames (like me)? Just play them in Japanese. Like movies/anime? Watch in Japanese. Tech news? Read in Japanese with browser plugins. Really, just do whatever you enjoy, but do it in Japanese. It will be hard at first, but you'll get used to it. 5. If your goal is to pass an exam (like N1), get books specific to that exam. [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [1] https://kanji.koohii.com/ https://kanji.koohii.com/