Hi all, I just wanted to share my Japanese learning experience here.

Due to the current MCO, I have a lot of time to spare so I decided to learn a new language as a challenge to myself. I chose Japanese due to its 'difficulty' and I also believe that there are plenty of resources available online with regard to teaching the Japanese language. I told my girlfriend that I will be proficient to hold a casual conversation with a native Japanese speaker in a year as a motivation to me in order to commit myself to learning a new language.

I begun my journey on 25th June 2021 so I have been learning Japanese for almost a month now on a daily basis. These are the tools I have been using to learn the language:
- Duolingo (Nothing too serious, just go on for like half an hour a day in total)
- Pimsleur (Really helpful in improving my speaking and listening skills)
- Mango Languages (Same as above)
- HelloTalk (Great app to talk to or socialise with native Japanese speakers)
- Anki and Wanikani for vocab building and kanji memorisation

In addition to the above, I try to watch as much JP language-oriented videos (eg: JP vloggers with Eng subs) as possible to provide me as much immersion to the language as I could.

I also tried using textbooks like Genki but the content is quite dry to capture my interest. I may reconsider it if I manage to get hold of a physical copy.

Here are some things I hope to improve on in the coming month:
- Read faster (I still need to take some time to read a sentence if it has more than 4 or 5 hiragana/katakana characters.)
- Able to figure out some grammar rules eventually (especially with regard to formal and informal verb forms)
- Pitch accent improvement
- Perhaps try to have a very basic conversation with a native Japanese speaker

To fellow Japanese speakers here, could you please advise me if there are any resources which you would recommend to optimise my Japanese learning experience? Please also share how your experience was like when you first started learning the language.

Thanks for recommending Tae Kim. This is an excellent primer to Japanese grammar which has been quite confusing to me.

It's nice that you could live in Japan for a year and get to fully immerse yourself in the language. Unfortunately for me, I don't have this opportunity so the least I could do is to talk to some Japanese via HelloTalk. When the Covid situation improves, I hope to find a KL-based native Japanese speaker who would be interested to meet up in person to exchange languages.