The starter kit

Six years. That’s how long it took me to reach the level I had after Genki 1, Genki 2 and Tobira. And I’m pretty sure a good starter deck plus one quick read through a grammar guide would’ve gotten me there way faster. So this chapter is short on purpose. The point of a starter kit is to get you to real, native Japanese as fast as you can stand, because that’s where most of the learning happens.

A starter deck

A starter deck is a set of flashcards with the most common words in Japanese, roughly in order. It’s the most bang for your buck you’ll ever get from flashcards. I wish I’d used one sooner instead of random decks, like the 10,000-word deck of nothing but nouns I downloaded early on. Half of those words, I’ve still never seen in the wild.

The one I’d point you to now is Kaishi 1.5K. It’s free and modern, every card has a natural example sentence and native audio, and it’s what SevenStop recommends too. I did about 3,000 words of the older Core 2K/6K deck back in the day, but a lot of my friends have done Kaishi and liked it.

Start at five new cards a day for the first week or two. I know. It sounds slow. Chapter 6 explains why it isn’t. Go up to ten or fifteen if your reviews feel easy, and please don’t jump to fifty. Ask me how I know. If a card has a word you already know from anime, mark it easy and move on.

▢ Screenshot neededA Kaishi 1.5K card in Anki: the front, and the back with the sentence and audioimages/guide/kaishi-card.png

One warning. Decks are addictive. At one point I had Anki open two hours a day and watched maybe twenty minutes of anime, which is completely backwards. Think of a starter deck as a springboard. Once you know most of it, jump.

Skim a grammar guide, once

You don’t need to memorize grammar before you start. You just need a rough map of how Japanese sentences work: particles, the main verb forms, the te-form, polite versus casual. Then immersion fills in the details. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese is the classic and it’s free, and Sakubi is shorter and made with immersion learners in mind. Just scroll through one of them at whatever pace feels okay. You won’t remember most of it, and that’s the point. Later, when you hear ～ている in an anime, a little bell goes off in your head, and context does the rest. Chapter 10 is all about learning grammar that way.

What about textbooks?

Genki and friends aren’t evil. Genki 1 was worth it for me, mostly for kana and the basic conjugations. DASmallWorlds went from Genki to Quartet to native material and reached N1, so the textbook route clearly works for some people.

The trap is what I call textbook jail. I loved the feeling of progress from Genki so much that I went straight into another textbook, Tobira. Then I’d flip back to old chapters, notice I was forgetting stuff, and never feel ready to move on. Meanwhile Genki 2 was teaching me 地球温暖化 (global warming) and 地理 (geography) before I could form a basic sentence. One practice sentence was basically “I gave my pet cobra a bath in the shower when it was cloudy.” When would you ever say that? What I should’ve done: finish the book once, drop it, and go read graded readers and watch slice-of-life anime until it all sank in.

Start immersing earlier than you think

The question I get most is “when can I start watching stuff?” Whenever you want. The catch is that earlier means harder, because you’ll be looking up almost everything:

Bob pauses every few seconds. Ross keeps finding great flashcard sentences. Both are doing it right; Ross is just having more fun. Right after Genki 2, I tried one of my favorite anime and it was way over my head. So I went back, did a core deck (suspending the words I already knew from the textbooks), and when I came back to the same show, it was watchable. Same show, same me, a few thousand more words. I switched to mostly immersing at around 3,000 known words, but you can start easy stuff like slice of life and comprehensible-input YouTube well before that. Chapter 7 covers picking content.

The order

1. Kana (chapter 3), which takes a few days.
2. Install Anki and the starter deck (chapter 5), which takes one evening.
3. Kaishi 1.5K at five to fifteen new cards a day, and while you do that:
4. Skim Tae Kim or Sakubi, once.
5. Start easy immersion alongside the deck.
6. Start mining your own cards from what you watch and read (chapter 6). The starter deck winds down and your mined deck takes over.