Use podcast： Japanesepod101

url: japanesepod101.com

You can also learn easy Japanese from the website of NHK.

personally i would advise people not to worry about kanji at all until you've already got a solid grasp of how to communicate in the language. hiragana only is harder to read than hiragana with kanji because there are no spaces so all words just run into each other. reading can obviously be useful for building your vocabulary but graded readers and many manga and such will at least have the hiragana written next to the kanji.

1st-2nd grade ish books would probably be a pretty decent level as they will expose you to various ways of saying things but won't have a bunch of kanji.

let yourself soak the language in, learn how it works, and develop a functional vocabulary and then go back and start learning the kanji and they will be far more easy to remember because you'll already have knowledge of the words you're trying to remember. when you start seeing them around you'll recognize them easier because of context, etc.

this is just my own personal opinion so take it however you'd like. not everyone learns the same way, i just think kanji are a big hurdle and why add extra hurdles if not absolutely necessary.

My English tutor who is learning Japanese alone showed me these resources.

- News web EASY (NHK)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/index.html

- Lang-8 (for any languages)
http://www.lang-8.com/

- iKnow! (smart phone app)
http://iknow.jp/

- Nihongonomori (free tutorial videos)
https://www.youtube.com/user/freejapaneselessons3/featured

Today I had a session with one of my language partners. She brought an interesting Japanese news article and read it together to improve her pronunciation and reading comprehension.

genki books are good, but since I live in China, I use textbooks in Chinese...and there is one website concerning japanese grammar> www.jpgram.org, that website is in English

Okay, Eli, do you really think nobody knows about reference links? A way to earn money, huh? lol

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