It will be overwhelming, but just keep plugging away at it. Formal education is the best way to ensure steady progress for most. Walk before you run.

For me, the two most challenging things are kanji and verb endings/compounds. For kanji, there are general guidelines on how to read them like if they’re in a two kanji word, it’s usually the Chinese reading, but sometimes they just stuck kanji onto a word that already existed in Japanese and it doesn’t match any of the guidelines. So just remember to give yourself extra kindness with learning them.

For verb endings, a ton of information is provided in the last few sounds/characters. Tense, ability, passive voice, formality, giving/receiving, etc. Pay extra attention to learning to listen for it and parse it.

There are general guidelines for proficiency in kanji, vocab, and grammar for five levels, N5 being the lowest. Aim for that first. It will give you a reasonable goal. There are also lists of kanji by school year for Japanese natives that can act as a guideline for what to start with.

For kanji lookup, I use an android app called kanjilookup because it is extremely forgiving on stroke order when it comes to recognition. When I learned, you had to figure out the part of the kanji that was the special part, then find that part in the 5 inch thick dictionary by how many additional strokes there are in the kanji. With the app, you can just write it. Your phone is probably your best tool. Get a good dictionary. Learn Japanese input. Another app that I’d recommend once you’ve learned a bit in Todaii easy Japanese. It provides a bunch of things including news articles where the pronunciation, definition, and level are a click away and there are comprehension questions at the end. It also has some mock exams.

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