I’ve learnt hiragana and katakana but now i feel like i’m just learning random words and it’s not really helping me. whats the best thing to learn next and are there any recommendations?
of course! i'm not very experienced, so take my recommendations with a grain of salt, but I think the best thing to do is to work through vocabulary, grammar and Kanji. It will feel really slow at first, but dont worry about how fast you go! any progress is good. this should help you with reading, writing, and speaking, i think. for listening, consider a group IRL that practices it or get Renshuu Pro. hope this helps!
The best way to motivate words is through dialogue. Unfortunately, dialogue is one of the things renshuu isn’t very good at yet, which is why I prefer to tell people to work with a textbook. If you don’t want to do that, the next best thing is the Beginner Sentences schedule. But don’t forget to finish the Basics schedules. Everything in there is fundamental to what comes next.
Up to you =p Renshuu allow you to learn whatever you want in whatever order you like.
Depending on your personal objective, you could continue with a pre-made schedule or list. Or also create your own schedule.
For people that want to live, study or work in japan relatively soon, the JLPT schedules are a good option. Especially since you will hear those words often. Like your entire life will become your SRS and make review those words. Otherwise, list like the kaishi 1.5K are more useful in my opinion. Especially for online learners that will mostly interact with japanese through internet.
It's useful to study at least one schedule with the most common words (until you've learn at least a 1000 or 2000 words). No need to go through it quickly tho. It's even better to study it slowly because those words will really common for everyone (even if you're not planning to go to japan). But after that, the usefulness of those common words start to decrease. Still useful to study them but depending on your objective there are less useful list.
In my case, for example, I started to interact with natives early on with language exchange communities. And learning "school" words were not useful for me. Learning the 36 greetings variant was more useful and important for me. And easier to learn practice, down to even the tone of the voice. Since almost everyday, I was exposed to a new greeting (やーほー、お疲れ様、お疲れ～、お疲れさん, etc.)
Also, if you don't like to learn random words like me, I heavily recommend you to try to become familliar with how renshuu works. There are tons of features to help with that (custom schedules, community lists, or even just the dictionary that allow to add word in one click). It takes more effort but it also more rewarding. At the same time, still recommend to leave at least one schedule to study common words (until you're past 2000 words which is a common threshold)
