Anki Website
Anki is a flashcard app where you can add decks of flash cards to repeat daily. You can either upload your own decks or download others people have made online or through Anki’s library. Decks are made for specific purposes: vocabulary, kanji, medical terms, golf terms, you name it.
The short of how Anki works is:
You set how many new cards to learn a day in a deck
Each day, Anki gives you a mix of up to X new cards (based on your settings) to learn, and staggered old cards from past days.
You honestly answer whether the card was good, easy, hard or you don’t know it. Be honest! Don’t cheat yourself! The harder you say it is, the sooner it will return (i.e. tomorrow). If you do not know it, you are shown the answer and will repeat it today, this session until you know it.
Download Anki and make an account, you’re about to get very intimate with Anki over the next year… 🙂
Alphabets
First and foremost, you need to learn Hiragana and Katakana.
There’s no short or pretty way to do this, but you should find your own way to do this online. It is a fairly short process and simply a matter of memorizing letters and shapes and there are at least 1million apps, services, decks, websites, guides and such to go about this. (You can also just find a deck for each on the Anki app I mentioned above)
While this may take some time (a week or three), if you stick to it you can nail this very quickly and do not need to overthink it.
Note: Katakana is hard! One of the reasons may be that a lot of letters look very similar, if your Katakana is poor or you miss a few or are slow at reading it, just move on! You’ll find out that even Japanese people have trouble reading long strings of Katakana, you’ll be just like them!