Im on day 5 of Japanese and I feel pretty confident in hiragana and katakana. If you showed me any characters I could tell you them immediately, but when I try reading long words on a youtube quiz it takes me a bit to actually sound the word out. I just want to know if I should start to learn grammar/kanji or continue to work on my hiragan and katakana
I would say, whenever you can see one of those symbols and can recognize what it is instantly, then thats pretty good. but you shouldnt feel stressed about the long words, those are sometimes tricky for me too. i would say to wait until you think your ready to move on to grammer or Kanji. you dont want to go into one of those utterly confused.
Congratulations! How about starting on the Basic Vocabulary and see how you do at reading the words while memorising their meanings? From this level on, the only way to get faster and more fluent at reading kana is actually stringing them together in words.
The recommended mastery schedules don't start you on kanji until beginner, but you're still on basics. You should start vocab and see how you do. I think the sooner you start reading words, the better. Speed will come with time, don't worry.
If you want to start kanji early, you can. You can either add the beginner kanji mastery schedule or make a kanji helper schedule. I think after only 5 days, you might want to hold off on kanji just a little bit just to be sure you actually have kana down. Trust me, they might feel easy now, but you will forget some. It's only been 5 days, after all.
if you’re doing all the reviews on your kana, and you still have time and motivation to do more, you should slowly start adding vocab.
but you should continue doing your reviews on your kana schedules! renshuu will slowly let those reviews peter out as you make fewer and fewer mistakes, and you will get a lot of practice as you see them in vocab and grammar. but they are very foundational, and you want to eventually get to a point where they’re as instantly readable as the latin alphabet.
be aware that, though it can be very tempting to add a lots of new items very quickly as you get started, you are creating a massive workload for your future. it takes over a year for a new item to completely move out of your schedule. so i really recommend not adding too many items too quickly.
