Study Resources

Hey there, I just started learning Japanese. I'm looking for reseources that can help me quickly gain reading comprehension, and if there are methods better than what I'm doing to learn.

I'm starting by learning the hirigana characters first, and once I have those down I'll start on katakana, and then kanji. I've been making flashcards with words on the sideas well.

My current resources are: Human Japanese, which is an interactive textbook, Duolingo, and Anki for flashcards. One thing that is slowing me down is that I want to be able to write properly as well as reading.

Hello!! 

Personally, I would advise you to drop Duolingo from your resources. There are many reasons on why Duolingo isn't a good way to learn japanese, but one of them is that their pronounciation/pitch accent (slight differences in the pitch of sounds that are used to differentiate words and convey sentence structure) are just plain wrong most of the time. I would recommend the app renshuu, It's a liiittle bit similar to tanoshii. (They don't have listening/speaking excersizes, though)

A good way to improve your reading (and listening!) is to engage with japanese posts on social media: wether it's cooking videos, fashion influencers, artists or whatever you're into. while yes, there's a LOT of kanji involved, I've found that reading their posts gets easier with time and the kanji get more recognizable. 

What also works for me personally to improve my reading (and for learning new sentences in general) is looking at the translations, romaji and original texts of j-songs I like

This might be a little more intermediate, but you could also start reading manga that are meant for younger audiences, like Precure or Pokemon, since they have easier sentences and if there is kanji in them, there's a hiragana reading aid either above or next to it (thats's called furigana btw).

I hope this made sense! Sorry I couldn't really give any tips on writing, as that's my biggest struggle currently lol TwT 

Best of luck!! :3