[zoltrix303]

I'm genuinely curious, is there other ressources you would recommend to use? I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters. I will start taking lessons with a teacher in April when i move there, but I wanted to arrive with some base.

[sw104]

If you find the right teacher, you shouldn't need a base, as such. If you really want a head start you could use books, but honestly language exchange / tutoring is the best way to go for starting any new language. Don't worry about trying to impress a teacher from scratch.

I'd at the least throw away apps and learning games, in favour of books (especially those with audio samples available).

If the Duolingo Japanese course is anything like the Duolingo Russian course I did, there's no explanation for anything and they just throw sentences at you to translate. I think they only give actual information to the French/Spanish courses as that's what most users are looking for.

[tokinonagare]

> I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters.

Well you see the exact issue with Duolinguo as pointed by others is that you feel you progressed for some months while in reality you didn't. If by the "characters" you mean hiragana and katakana both set can be learn to basic proficiency in a week (actually over a weekend for motivated people). If you mean kanji, the first set of 80 can be done quietly in a month (3 weeks in my case, when I was in high school, no tutor, no class, wikipedia only).

[Tainnor]

I you want to get a head start on something, Kanji is probably a good idea - there are about 2000 of them in common use (more, if you read more advanced stuff or in names), and teachers probably won't have a lot of time going over them. Plus, you essentially just have to memorise them, something you can only do on your own.

There are several ways of learning Kanji, each with their benefits and drawbacks, such as WaniKani, Remembering the Kanji, Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, etc. Ultimately, Kanji are painful and time-intensive to learn, so none of these will be perfect, but you can maybe spend some initial time trying to find out which works best for you and then just stick with it.

[Tor3]

If you want to learn the basics of Japanese in a reasonably effective manner, you could try Human Japanese, you can use the 'light' version (free) first (on e.g. Android), it'll give you the first 7 chapters I think, and if that works for you then buy the full version for just a few dollars. It definitely worked for me and had the right progression, and teaches the very basics quite well. It even understands and explains how the は particle is never a subject particle.. unlike so many other tools out there.

Stay away from Duo. There's no structure to its teaching of Japanese, and it's not set up to let you intuit the grammar or structure either.

[naet]

Japanese on Duolingo honestly sucks in my opinion, even just compared to other Duolingo programs.

Duolingo isn't optimized for Japanese and it shows some major pain points especially around kanji and Japanese grammar.

There are a lot of more specialized Japanese learning apps if you need an app, and also many good textbooks and video lessons that are probably better than most apps.

[majewsky]

For learning Kanji, I wholeheartedly recommend WaniKani (https://wanikani.com). Not saying that you should stop Duolingo if it works for you, but you'll likely get much more out of 30 minutes spent on WaniKani than 30 minutes spent on Duolingo.

[ivank]

https://cijapanese.com/ Comprehensible Japanese