I've been learning Japanese on and off for a few years now. I've wasted my fair share of time chasing inefficient learning methods, but I've also found some valuable tools and learning resources. Below are some notes that may be of interest if you are studying Japanese. Most of the tricks I've learned, however, apply to learning any language; see here.

tools

• mokuro / a tool (that can be run locally) for OCR-ing and then reading manga in the browser. Incredibly useful for immersing with manga using a pop-up browser dictionary such as Yomitan.
• kanji.club / a neat little tool that you can use to break down kanji into components, or to search for kanji by components.
• imabi.org / a rather thoroughly explained grammar reference that provides more linguistic/technical details than most other references do.
• syosetsu.com / literally titled "let's become novelists", this is a free platform for publishing and reading stories. Especially common and popular are light novels (ラノベ), of which a lucky few are adapted to manga or anime. The challenge here is finding stories suited to your interests and your reading level. One approach is to find manga or anime at your level that were originally published here.
• on narrow reading / I found this article to be an encouraging introduction to reading immersion. I found it around the time I had finished the first few chapters of my first light novel on syosetsu (see above). It has a nice description of the "first few pages effect" that I experienced.

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