Don't put this "new guide" in DJT's OP. It's for confused beginners, not new learners.
If you think the "old guide" in DJT's OP is bad, get them to update it or make your own spinoff.
First things first: install Rikaichamp or Yomichan. Mouseover J-E dictionaries for major browsers.
So you want to learn Japanese.
Learning a language takes a long time. Several years. So you want to know what you're in for.
And if you spend too many months on things that don't help, it's a huge waste of time. So you want to know what doesn't work.
This guide will show you what things there are to learn, what to avoid, and some recommended resources. This guide will NOT teach you Japanese.
After reading this guide, you should view the Resource List for where to get various resources mentioned here, or to find alternatives to them.
This guide was written because the usual DJT guide strives to be so neutral that its reasoning is too confusing for actual absolute beginners to understand what to think about the options it presents. This guide is not as impartial as the usual DJT guide.
It's virtually impossible to learn a language without either reading a lot in that language or moving somewhere that it's spoken. Contrary to popular belief, moving there is NOT required, nor recommended. Moving takes a lot of money, and it's a commitment that can ruin someone's livelihood if things don't go well.
And if you want to get a lot of natural exposure to the spoken language without reading and without moving there, it's going to be very hard to understand anything for several months.
Listening is very important, almost mandatory, but it's very slow to learn by listening alone. Reading will be your primary source of practice, for a lot of reasons. The most obvious is that reading works at your own pace, and listening doesn't, but spoken Japanese also has more ambiguity problems (including large numbers of homophones) that written Japanese does not have. These aren't problems for the intermediate learner, but spoken Japanese can brutalize an absolute beginner if their ears don't know what they're looking for.
This doesn't mean you should avoid listening comprehension. You want to be able to understand as much spoken as possible. If your reading comprehension skills get too far ahead of your listening comprehension skills, your learning will slow down, because the deepest instinctive language learning parts of your brain won't be operating efficiently.
The focus on reading means that a good grasp on how the Japanese writing system works is vital. Even though this guide won't teach you Japanese, it's best to tell you about how Japanese writing works, because a lot of resources out there are full of misinformation or gloss over stuff for no reason.
Japanese uses four main writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and the Latin Alphabet.
The hiragana are a set of glyphs that represent each of the core syllables in Japanese.
The katakana are another set of glyphs. Each katakana corresponds 1:1 to a hiragana, and vice versa.
The collective term for hiragana and/or katakana is "kana".
The kanji are a set of thousands of characters loaned from China over the course of a thousand and a half years.
The latin alphabet is the same alphabet used to write English.
Japanese text typically doesn't use spaces unless it's written in pure hiragana/katakana, like picture books for very young children.
Japanese has completely different punctuation rules than western languages, and Japanese writing can have linewraps in the middle of words.
Hiragana and kanji are the basis of modern Japanese writing. For the most part, grammatical function words are spelled in hiragana, and normal words are spelled in kanji.
Katakana are mainly used for spelling loanwords, but they are also used for: emphasis, replacing rare kanji with their phonetic reading, a small number of native words, making text feel like it has a weird accent, breaking up long strings of hiragana by spelling some words in katakana instead of hiragana, etc.
The hiragana and katakana can use small kana to write digraphs, like じゃ or って.
The simplest syllable in Japanese consists of a single "mora", even if it takes two kana to spell it. A mora is like a syllable, but because Japanese has true long vowels, the mora is limited to only short syllables. Haikus contain 5-7-5 morae, not 5-7-5 syllables. とうきょう is five kana, four morae, and two syllables. と・う・き・ょ・う -> と・う・きょ・う -> とう・きょう.
The kanji are used to write Chinese loan words, Japanese words derived from Chinese loan words, and native Japanese words. Kanji are not words. Japanese natives learn a little over 2000 kanji during compulsory education, but almost 3000 kanji are used on a somewhat regular basis across all aspects of Japanese life, including kanji that are only used in names and obscure jargon.
When there are kanji in writing meant for children, the words written with kanji usually have small kana next to them, indicating the pronunciation of the word. These small kana are usually called furigana or yomigana.
The generic term for small text next to words is ruby text. The term ruby text also applies to situations where words have entire other words written next to them. In these cases, the small text is what is "said" or "conveyed", and the main word is just a translation or alternative representation of it.
In Japanese, the latin alphabet is primarily used to write initialisms like JR (Japan Railways) and JK (joshi kousei, female highschooler).
Aside from that, it's also used for romanizations (transcriptions into the latin alphabet) of Japanese words and names on various signs, such as in airports or stations.
Short version:
The summary above is a very bad outline. If you follow the summary without knowing what each step actually wants you to do, you're going to be bashing your head into a wall. Please read the long version and understand why each step is done.
There aren't any shortcuts to this process. This is the fastest way to learn Japanese, aside from just forcing yourself to read without knowing anything about Japanese, which is brutal and leaves a lot of room for confusion.
Every step before "reading for more than ten minutes at a time" is preparation. Until you start reading for more than ten minutes at a time, you haven't started learning Japanese.
https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/index.html
Using this page, memorize the hiragana and katakana by pure rote for a week or two at most. You should spend more than five minutes on it every day. After a week or two have passed, consider this step "done" and move on, even if there are a few kana that you still can't recognize reliably.
Memorizing them here only makes them familiar to you. Fluently sounding out strings of hiragana comes from reading practice, not more memorization.
Using a list of mnemonics for each kana will only slow down memorizing each kana. This makes it seem to take less effort because you're reviewing each kana fewer times, but each review takes longer because of the mnemonic. The mnemonics will also take months to fade, and until then, you will have a hard time recognizing the kana without the mnemonic bubbling up too. For the kana, pure rote is more effective than using mnemonics, even though it seems a lot more boring.
There's one exception to not using mnemonics for the kana, and that exception is the four katakana シツソン. These kana are so similar that it usually takes a month or so to reliably distinguish them through pure rote. The mnemonic I used for シツソン was made of three patterns: "SHIT SON", 2211, and -||-. Alternatively, you can use a stroke order based mnemonic. For シツ alone, their stroke orders respectively follow the same path as the hiragana しつ. ソン are harder, but you can remember that, having a vowel in it, ソ is more like リ, and リ is easy to remember correctly because of the hiragana り. リソン. Rison.
The purpose of memorizing vocabulary early on is not to make it so you "know the words". It's supposed to make you more familiar with how Japanese words look and feel when written. This makes it way easier to deal with Japanese being used in early learning resources, and easier to look at Japanese text and see more than moon runes.
Start memorizing vocabulary from a frequency list. You can do this any way you want, but the most effective way is to use a certain kind of simple computerized flashcard. You want to use spaced repetition software, like Anki, and use cards that have the spelling on the front, and the reading and pronunciation on the back.
Commonly recommended premade Anki decks: Core 2k/6k - Anonymous Core 5000
This is a very simple method of memorizing vocabulary, and you might think it's not good enough. However, other methods have the same problem as using mnemonics for the kana. The more information you add to flashcards, the more that information gets associated with what you're trying to memorize. Having a lot more information is fine at the beginning, but after a few days or weeks, it starts to interfere with your memorization and makes it harder to recognize the word outside of flashcards.
You should study grammar at the same time as memorizing vocabulary.
Like vocabulary, studying grammar early on is not supposed to make you "know Japanese grammar". It's supposed to make your brain understand the way Japanese grammar feels, and give you a solid frame of reference when you need to figure out or look up grammar on your own.
Humans are even worse at explaining grammar than defining words, so you should be super careful that you treat grammar resources like help, not word of god.
Read Tae Kim's grammar guide. Not Tae Kim's complete guide. The complete guide is incomplete and bad.
You want to read the grammar guide, once, and quickly, to familiarize yourself with what kind of grammar there is. You don't want to try to master it.
Tae Kim's grammar guide should not take more than a month to complete. In fact, a month is pretty slow. You don't want to memorize it, you want to get it into your head quickly and then review it once in a while later.
Tae Kim's grammar guide has bad explanations for certain things. Here are better explanations of those things. Read these when Tae Kim explains them.
は and が: は is a topic particle and can even replace を, not just が. が is just a subject particle, even when the verb or adjective is something like 好き or 食べたい. が doesn't have a special ability to focus the subject, the mere action of explicitly including the subject instead of dropping it is what puts focus on it. If the subject has to be stated to be understood, then stating it doesn't put focus on it.
に and へ: https://sakubi.neocities.org/#moving
ていく and てくる: (long page, skim it) http://www.imabi.net/teikutekuru.htm
This should be done at the same time as learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, but it's a bad idea to start it at the same time.
Start grammar and vocabulary first, give it a few days or a week, then start testing yourself by trying to read. You want to be able to recognize the most important ten or so grammatical particles, and have a rough ability to guess at where words start and end. Then you can start testing yourself.
Find anything interesting with Japanese text. Manga, social media, porn, news sites, lyrics, games, titles, anything. Look at this text and try to figure out what particles and words are being used. Look for sentences that are short and use words that are easy to understand. Look for phrases that use the grammar and words you're learning.
Ironically, news sites are a good idea at this stage, because it's possible to vaguely understand what short news-like sentences mean by translating them word-by-word. The messages conveyed by polite written communications are always recognizable if you can look up each word. This stops being the case when you start reading for real and the large number of words means that you have to look up a lot, even though the grammar is simple.
Social media is very easy to access and find interesting stuff, but it's very likely to use obscure slang that will confuse you until you're an intermediate reader. If you run into something on social media and it's hard to look up, just skip it.
Again, this stage isn't for "reading at length as a kind of input", this stage is for practicing the vocabulary and grammar you're learning so that you don't forget it. Practicing it by seeking out real native-written material in the wild is way, way more effective and less boring than doing textbook exercises, and gradually leads to an ability to be able to read for real.
You should start reading for real after either one of two possible conditions have been satisfied.
At this point, you should consider reading to be something that you do for input, not something that you do to test the grammar and words you're memorizing. Even if you still feel uncomfortable reading, you need to start easing yourself to treating it like something you do for entertainment or information, rather than something you do to test your Japanese.
The best early reading materials are:
(Texthooking is using external programs to rip text out of games to make it easy to look up words in dictionaries. Do not use machine translation tools or parsers that force furigana insertion. They will make mistakes, confuse you, and make you learn Japanese slower or not at all.)
You can find manga with furigana by searching 漫画 立ち読み or 漫画 試し読み on google to find legal online manga sites that let you preview stuff. This is how you check whether a given series has furigana.
You can find short visual novels with https://tlwiki.org/?title=VN/Eroge_Script_sizes or http://wiki.wareya.moe/Stats
If you start with manga, you want an external source of passive listening exposure, so that you pick up on how the syllables REALLY sound. English-subtitled anime is fine at this stage. Eventually you want listening exposure that doesn't have a translation attached.
The ability to read comfortably comes from reading a lot and having the attitude that you're reading for the sake of whatever is written in what you're reading.
If memorizing vocabulary seems pointless because you're learning words you don't see and you're not learning words you see all the time, start "mining". Mining is when you memorize words that you encounter in what you're reading rather than memorizing words from a frequency list. Frequency lists are a very good place to start, but they're always targeted at a specific variety of Japanese, and it's always going to be at least slightly different than what you're actually reading.
Even when you're mining, memorization is not meant to teach you words. It's meant to make it easier for your brain to "hang on" to its intuitive understanding of the words used in what you're reading. Nobody ever learned French by memorizing a French-English dictionary.
The easiest and most effective way to learn the hiragana/katakana is to drill them with brute force for a week or two. It will take a lot longer for you to have 100% recall of each syllable without any ambiguity. Once you apply a week or two worth of effort, you should consider memorizing the kana "done" and move on to later stages of Japanese.
Yes, you must learn the kana. No, you cannot learn to read Japanese with just romanization.
https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/index.html
You can't "learn kanji". You can only learn words that are written with those kanji. "Learning kanji" on its own is like learning trivia. It might help you avoid being confused, but it doesn't actually teach you Japanese. The act of studying kanji on their own as individual things, while avoiding words written with them, is called "isolated kanji study".
There are three good reasons to study isolated kanji. If none of them apply to you, isolated kanji study should be treated like learning trivia, not studying Japanese.
For more information on kanji study: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/you-cant-learn-kanji/
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.