Kana is done. What now?

What finishing kana actually means

If you can read and write all 46 out of order, you own the sound system of Japanese. Any Japanese word written in kana is now pronounceable.

Anything with furigana is readable too, kanji and all — manga, lower-grade readers, children’s websites.

And you can use a dictionary, because you can write down what you hear and look it up. That is a bigger shift than it sounds.

Start these three together

• Basic grammar — です/ます, the particles は, が, を, に, で, and verb conjugation. None of this needs kanji.
• Basic vocabulary — greetings, numbers, time, and perhaps the hundred most common verbs. Learning them in kana is fine.
• Kanji — starting with the frequent, low-stroke ones: 一二三, 人, 日, 月, 山, 川.

Put kanji last of the three. Kanji alone does not let you build sentences, and not building sentences is what makes people stop.

JLPT N5 is a good target

The JLPT runs from N5 to N1. N5 is the entry level and covers a sensible slice of the basics.

It is roughly 100 kanji, 800 words and beginner grammar — commonly estimated at three to six months at an hour a day.

It is worth using as a target even if you never sit the exam, because the syllabus is fixed. That removes a lot of time spent wondering what to study next.

Keep kana turning over

Kana is not learned once and done. Leave it for a few weeks and the lookalike pairs blur first.

While you work on grammar and vocabulary, one shuffled round a week is enough to hold it. Five minutes does the job.

Katakana fades fastest. Hiragana keeps appearing in every sentence, while katakana only shows up when a loanword does — so drill katakana on its own.