Q: Why does this method work?
A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w - The only problem with Krashen's explanation of language acquisition is that it's focused 100% on language instruction, not self-learning. When you're teaching yourself, you don't have access to someone that generates input calibrated to your level. This is why this method focuses on reading, and why you start learning vocabulary and grammar on its own even though he seems to recommend against it. In language instruction, teaching something means you're going to have tests on what you're taught. If you don't have tests, then doing very basic studying at the beginning just fast forwards you through the "points at head, 'atama' is the word for this" stage of language learning.
Q: How long will it take to be fluent?
A: At least four years.
Q: What the fuck?
A: You're going to be able to understand media with relative ease a long time before that. Fluency is a higher bar.
Q: This is too slow!
A: Should've been born Japanese. You can't short circuit the process any more than it's been short circuited here.
Q: What about listening and speaking?
A: Start listening to whatever you want as soon as you're able to. No, there are no good resources for people to teach themselves how to listen without reading.
Q: Reading is too hard! I have to look up, like, every word!
A: Find something easier to read. If you're already using the simplest thing you can find and you have to look up every word, you're still in the "reading to practice vocabulary/grammar" stage, and shouldn't force yourself or you'll burn out.
Q: I'm still in the "reading to practice vocabulary/grammar" stage after three months. What gives?
A: That means either you're not applying yourself or you're practicing with material that you don't really understand. The absolute easiest media to read is manga meant for middleschoolers that has furigana. Examples include: Flying Witch, Zettai Reiiki, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Nagasarete Airantou, Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya (yes, really). Manga meant for young children is more likely to use lots of slang or cover subject matter that isn't interesting to adults. Manga without furigana is hard to understand until you reach a high intermediate level. Visual novels don't have furigana.
Q: What does furigana have to do with reading?
A: When you're reading as an absolute beginner, furigana is not supposed to make it easier to look up words (though it's helpful for that), it's supposed to make it easier to subconsciously figure out what words mean without having to look them up, and help learn their pronunciations by exposure. Shed the feeling that you're missing out on nuance if you don't look up every single word. You're not going to have 100% or even 99% comprehension until you're fluent, no matter how many times you look up the same words in the same sentence. Once you understand what a statement is conveying, make sure your brain has been reminded of the existence of each of the words in the statement and what order they went in, then move on.
Q: I don't understand <specific grammatical construction>. It's keeping me from understanding this sentence. What do I do?
A: Look it up in A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners: https://www.google.com/search?q="handbook+of+japanese+grammar+patterns"
Q: What about sentence decks/grammar decks?
A: Those are for people who are allergic to actually reading.
Q: How do I look stuff up on google? I keep getting weird results.
A: Google includes Chinese results by default if the search query does not contain any kana. To look up Japanese, cut the search URL down to the minimum and add &hl=ja to it.
Q: How do I look up Japanese word definitions?
A: Xという意味 - This doesn't mean "meaning of X", Xの意味 does, but the results are slightly better, and の意味 brings up Google's define/translate widget.
Q: How do I figure out what words mean when I can't read Japanese definitions?
A: Use a J-E dictionary or google images.
Q: Which readings do I use in this word?
A: Words typically only have one reading, even if the kanji in them have multiple readings. Kanji are not words. Kanji are a way of writing words.
Q: I'm functionally illiterate. (Reading English for long periods of time makes me fall asleep.) What do I do?
A: Video series: Let's Learn Japanese Basic I / Basic II. You're probably going to have to pirate it.
Q: What about pitch accent?
A: Very important, but beginner's resources in it are garbage. The #1 rule for this is to not force output until you are already comfortable in producing it, which will guarantee that your brain hasn't forced itself to invent a fake accent system, and whatever system it has come up with won't be impossible to fix. Aside from that, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jakXVEUTT48
Q: How do I find raw manga/untranslated visual novels?
A: All legal digital raw manga services have weak region locks in place, so if you don't live in Japan, pirating untranslated manga is not depriving the creator of a sale. However, some manga series, especially old popular ones, have long free previews (e.g. an entire volume or more) on digital manga sites, without region locks in place, in order to attract people to digital services. Visual novels are more of a lost cause, because every sale, even imports, matters to the developers a lot. Some visual novels are popping up with Japanese language support on Steam. Check there before pirating.
Q: What about <textbook>? I got it from a <friend/family member/instructor>.
A: You can use it as a reference or something to use on the side, but textbooks have a fundamental problem: they're designed to be used as part of a curriculum. They target grammar points and vocabulary based on their presence in assessment tests, not their actual utility. Even worse than that, though, is that they might leave out simple things that are confusing to explain in text, and expect the teacher to pick up the slack during lectures. An example of this is Genki I&II leaving out the location particle sense of から, only including it as a one-off definition in a reading exercise. Language textbooks are all riddled with a large number of minor omissions like this, and they cannot be used alone as self-teaching resources. If you don't trust community resources, don't skip over to textbooks entirely, use the textbook at the same time as the community resource.
Q: I've been memorizing words for weeks and kanji still look like scribbles! Help!
A: Do a simple radical deck like Kangxi Radicals 2017 for a week or skim through a kanji course like the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course for a few days. You should only do this until kanji stop looking like scribbles. Your brain needs to make new neural connections to process the shapes in kanji efficiently, and this takes time and exposure. For some people this takes a long time to happen automatically when memorizing vocabulary, and they need to trick their brains into focusing on the individual parts of the kanji.
Q: I'm having trouble with <specific kanji> when it keeps showing up words, but I hear bad things about kanji study. What should I do?
A: Study it. The bad reputation for kanji study is about studying All The Kanji on their own, not specific kanji. In fact, it's not uncommon for people who hate on RTK to think it's okay to learn how to write a hundred or so basic kanji, for various reasons. That aside, if you keep seeing a kanji over and over again, there's a good chance that it's a Chinese loanword with a consistent meaning and pronunciation. Go ahead and learn it. 冒険者 makes a lot more sense when you realize it breaks down to literally mean bold/brave + risk/peril + doer. However, resources meant for Japanese often have very bad definitions for single kanji, generalized from the most common or important Japanese words that use those kanji. You might have to look up the kanji in resources that cover Chinese, like Wiktionary.
Q: What's wrong with isolated kanji study?
A: It takes a lot of time and the most popular resources for it are very bad. Also, kanji are not words, and learning kanji on their own doesn't result in being able to read Japanese unless you can already speak Japanese. Kanji study is not inherently bad, but if you do isolated kanji study early on in the process of learning Japanese, you're very likely to use a type of isolated kanji study that wastes a lot of time and has very limited long term benefits.
Q: What's wrong with RTK?
A: RTK is directly inferior to other isolated kanji resources. It's only well-known because it's already popular, not because it's good. In particular, the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course is better than it in every comparable way.
Q: What about Wanikani?
A: Any subscription service will be designed in such a way as to slow you down or keep you from catching up to your original speed if you fall behind. Wanikani is designed this way. You cannot exceed a certain speed, not even if you already know the very most basic stuff it teaches. In addition, wanikani teaches garbage meanings for components when correct components would be fine. In the kanji 持, it teaches that the left-side component means "nailbat", when in reality, it means "hand" and directly contributes to the meaning of "possess". Wanikani's vocabulary list is actually not terrible, but it's impossible to overlook the way it's integrated with the rest of the service and the fact that it's a subscription that costs three digits of united states dollars before it takes you anywhere useful.
Q: What about Duolingo?
A: It's bad. Nobody knows how it managed to be this bad. But it's just bad. Really.
Q: Where do I get a texthooker?
A: WARNING: PORNOGRAPHIC ADS: http://www.hongfire.com/forum/forum/hentai-lair/hentai-game-discussion/tools-and-tutorials/411001-ithvnr-ith-with-the-vnr-engine/page11#post5731129
Q: Tae Kim is boring, what are the alternatives?
A: Tae Kim's grammar guide is a bit of an outlier. There are very few grammar guides that have the same philosophy as it. The closest alternative is Sakubi.
Q: How do I look up Kanji?
A: The easiest kanji lookup tool is the handwriting recognition in the web version of Google Translate.
Q: What is this hiragana? It's a circle with a gap in the bottom left and straight lines on the bottom and left side.
A: It's the katakana ロ written without lifting up the pen/pencil/brush. Compare to its stroke order.
Q: There's a ゛ on this vowel. What does it mean?
A: It means that the vowel sounds funny/muffled/strangled/offcenter. Note that on ウ・う it actually means a "vu" syllable instead, and stuff like ゔぃ is like "vi". V is pronounced as b by most speakers, especially old and middle aged normal people.
Q: There are a lot of words like ふむ and ぐぬぬ that are pronounced by the voice actors differently than how they're spelled. What gives?
A: These are para-linguistic words that use sound sequences that are invalid in normal Japanese words. Some examples in English are "nuh-uh" and "tsk tsk". ふむ represents "hmm" and ぐぬぬ represents a soft growl.
A: This is too hard!
A: You can't learn Japanese. In more seriousness, if things are REALLY too hard and too unintelligible, feel free to slow down and supplement your studies with more traditional study resources. You will learn slower and less efficiently, but your "affective filter" will be lowered, which allows the deepest instinctive language learning parts of your brain to do more. Always remember that you won't start "really" learning Japanese until you start reading Japanese at length on a regular basis.