>>1224051In general you want to start reading as soon as possible. Japanese pronunciation is very simple, you can learn vocabulary as you go, and grammar isn't too much of an issue until you want to start writing or speaking the language, which won't be for a while.
The first thing you need to do is brute force memorize the two alphabets of Japanese; hiragana and katakana. You can do this by making flashcards yourself or using software like Anki. In total this is about 100-200 symbols depending on how you count them. Learning this will be a few hours of brute force memorization but you don't need to know them perfectly yet, you just need to be pretty good at them. You can learn the rest on the way.
After this you should get an electronic dictionary. Electronic dictionaries are much faster than paper ones because you can just copy and paste unknown words into them instead of painstakingly spelling them out symbol by symbol. The dictionary I personally use is Aedict but even something like Google Translate is okay.
Next, choose a Japanese book you would like to read. Choose something you can copy and paste so it works with your dictionary. The book you choose also shouldn't be too difficult. Challenging is good, don't be afraid of reading something with, say, a high school reading level. Just don't jump head first into classical literature or poetry.
The best type of book to read is a voiced visual novel so you can hear how the text is pronounced as you read. You can copy and paste the text from a visual novel by using the program Interactive Text Hooker. ITH supports many visual novels out of the box, but requires an "H-Code" for others. H-Codes look like this: /HSN-1C@466897 You can find H-Codes for most visual novels online.
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