COMPUTER SPECIFIC STUFF

- Some games have DRM that literally MUST be cracked or you won't be able to play them at all unless you have a real Japanese copy of windows and live in Japan.
- Some games require you to have windows set to have a Japanese UI (language) and/or Japanese date/time/region format (locale) settings, otherwise they'll bug out or crash. In my experience, the locale (date/time/region) setting is the most important one.
- Locale Emulator and Applocale can be a replacement for changing your UI/locale settings, but they don't always work.

JAPANESE SPECIFIC STUFF

Foundations / the ability to, with effort, understand what you're reading:
- Learn the hiragana and katakana
- Study basic grammar
- It's PROBABLY a good idea to learn some common words like 私, 言う, and 今日 (just for an example of what "basic" means), and the kanji for things like numbers and positions/directions (上, 下, 左, 右, etc), but it's not TECHNICALLY necessary.

Basic grammar (even just the very basics) and the hiragana and katakana are ACTUALLY necessary. When people try to learn Japanese without studying grammar or learning the kana before reading, they usually quit after a few days or a week or two because it's so stressful to learn that way. Some people pull it off, you probably won't.

- Recommended resource for the hiragana and katakana:
-- https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/learn/kana.html or https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/index.html
- Recommended resource for grammar:
-- https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/grammar/taekim.html (skip the writing system sections, don't do any of the exercises)

Your choice of kana and grammar resources doesn't REALLY matter as long as they're not designed around having an instructor or take a long time to finish. You have to tolerate them, and they shouldn't expect too much of you. That's about it.

You should start reading the moment you feel comfortable, even if you're only a quarter or half of the way through your grammar guide. You can keep reading it if you want, just start reading as soon as you feel like it.

Copying the onscreen text to your clipboard:
- Textractor: https://gist.github.com/wareya/cefad42fdbc23afbc1666c2e71c9e6ba
- ITHVNR-3.5640.1-win32
- Cheat Engine with Hook Any Text or your own dank lua hook scripts

NOTE: Normal texthooking tools probably don't work with some installations of Windows 10, which has a specific security feature that interferes with how most texthookers hook into applications to get text. There's a way around this, but it's generally a bad idea, because it makes your computer less secure. I don't have any other advice about this. It's up to you.

Getting clipboard text into your web browser:
- nazeka (firefox) (disclaimer: I develop this)
- Clipboard Inserter (firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clipboard-inserter/
- Clipboard Inserter (chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clipboard-inserter/deahejllghicakhplliloeheabddjajm
- Setup for either Clipboard Inserter extension (not necessary for nazeka):
-- Save one of the following as an HTML file (Right click -> Save Page As... -> save it as a .html file with whatever name you want). It's a blank page that will automatically scroll down as new stuff is added to it, will stop auto-scrolling if you scroll up, and will resume auto-scrolling if you scroll back down to the bottom.
--- Plain (no styling or extras; only auto-scroll): http://pastebin.com/raw/VMBAnawh
--- Styled 1 (easy to edit): http://pastebin.com/raw/DRDE075L
--- Styled 2 (easy to edit), a character/line counter, and an undo button: http://pastebin.com/raw/HxjV6YrB

Looking up words without leaving the clipboard grabber:
- Yomichan (firefox, chrome)
- Rikaichamp (firefox)
- Rikai Rebuilt (firefox)
- nazeka (firefox) (disclaimer: I develop this, please don't use it unless you're very lazy, I don't want to have to do tech support because of this video)

^-- These are all edict/jmdict frontends. Some of them (yomichan, nazeka) technically have support for other dictionary data, with varying levels of setup difficulty and jank, but you can worry about that once you can actually read definitions written in Japanese.

Looking up words manually:
- google
-- if you get chinese results, add とは or という to the search, or add &hl=ja to the url
- edict/jmdict interfaces
-- https://jisho.org/
-- https://tangorin.com/
-- https://www.tagaini.net/ tagaini jisho (application) (hasn't had a new release in a great while, its copy of jmdict is out of date)
- online J-E dictionaries that AREN'T edict/jmdict interfaces:
-- https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/en/
-- https://ejje.weblio.jp/
- online J-J dictionaries
-- goo https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/
-- weblio https://www.weblio.jp/
-- kotobank https://kotobank.jp/dictionary/
-- japanese wiktionary
- "collective knowledge" communities
-- nicovideo's dictionary/encyclopedia https://dic.nicovideo.jp/
-- yahoo japan's chiebukuro https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/

Random advice:

- People say that it only takes a few hours to "learn" the hiragana and katakana, but you need about a week of consistent exposure to them to stop forgetting them.

- Grammar isn't "done" just because you start reading, regardless of whether you finished your grammar guide or dropped it instead. You're going to keep learning it. Either by getting a feel for it from exposure or looking it up a lot. And when you look it up, you have to look it up the hard way, using google. No mouseover dictionary for grammar. That's just how it is.

- It's not necessary to force yourself to learn to write or to passively listen to Japanese for a month before you start reading. You can do it if you want. But you don't NEED to. Do what you want to do, not what people tell you you SHOULD do. Even if you turn out to be wrong it doesn't matter, you kept yourself on track and didn't quit because of something stupid and that's what counts.

- As a beginner, any grammar or vocabulary resource you use WILL lie to you to make things possible to understand. This is fine. Just be aware of it, don't treat anything as cold hard fact, and don't worry about misunderstanding things too much. You WILL misunderstand a LOT of things when you start out, no matter how much time you spend on a sentence or grammar guide. You'll clear out your misunderstandings through extensive consumption of Japanese.

- Reading will be VERY, VERY, VERY hard when you first start out. THIS IS NORMAL. You might only be able to """read""" for a couple minutes at a time before your brain fogs over and you can't think anymore. Just keep putting in effort every single day until you start making progress. It gets easier. It stays hard for a while. But it DOES get easier. And eventually, some day, it'll get easy. Just don't give up, and don't look back on your mistakes.

- You should prefer to read things that are interesting to you in particular, even if they seem a little harder than something that's boring.

- You should also prefer to read things that have substantial voice acting, so that your subvocalization isn't TOO wrong.

- As a complete beginner, it's a bad idea to try to read real science fiction or politics, or anything that's known for being especially difficult, esoteric, or complex. Even if it's extremely compelling. Save the good stuff for when it doesn't take several minutes to get through two lines of text.

- Be at least slightly skeptical of anything that a stranger writes in English about Japanese on the internet, even if they seem to have credentials or are a native speaker of Japanese. Not skeptical in the "consider the opposite of what they're saying" sense. Skeptical in the "they might be misinformed or explaining something incorrectly or using the wrong words" sense.

- Don't use machine translation tools. They're bad for you. They will cripple your intuitive understanding of Japanese grammar and pragmatics. (The only thing Google Translate is any good for is the handwriting recognition feature. No, it's not even useful as a dictionary.)

- Don't use parsers. They're not REALLY bad for you, but they're VERY confusing/misleading and you're better off just using one of the mouseover dictionaries described above. You will read faster and learn faster with a mouseover dictionary than a parser.

- Mouseover dictionaries find stuff by looking for the longest "word" starting at the character your mouse is over. This "word" might be complete bullshit. Just because something shows up in your mouseover dictionary doesn't mean it's actually a word that's being used by what you're reading. If you looked up "ally" you'd get a nickname, even if the word you looked it from is actually "actually". In fact, MOST things your mouseover dictionary will show you are complete nonsense, because most characters in a line aren't the beginning of a new word. Use your brain. You'll develop an intuition for where word boundaries lay soon enough. (Parsers are MUCH WORSE about this, not better.)

- JMDict/edict and wiktionary are maintained by volunteers, many of whom do not have functional understandings of Japanese. They contain errors. This is okay as long as you're aware of it. Don't doubt yourself too much when a definition seems to be consistently wrong in the context of what you're reading. If you're truly confused, ask someone who knows Japanese for help. (For example, JMDict used to contain 魔法陣 only as an incorrect spelling of 魔方陣 with the same meaning, when in reality, it's a separate word with a different meaning, not an error. http://www.edrdg.org/jmdictdb/cgi-bin/entr.py?svc=jmdict&sid=&q=1671750 http://www.edrdg.org/jmdictdb/cgi-bin/entr.py?svc=jmdict&sid=&q=2836551)

- Google translate is only useful for handwriting recognition. Don't even attempt to use it as a dictionary.

- Trying to think of entire sentences in terms of what they would mean in English is bad and you should try to avoid it. In particular, translating every sentence explicitly into English as you read it is bad. It's slow and sometimes reinforces misunderstandings that would remain ambiguous in your head until resolved naturally otherwise.

- Most of the games that are frequently recommended to beginners are actually just completely normal Japanese. Bog standard, right in the middle of the road, not particularly simple or complex at all. Don't beat yourself up for something that's "supposed to be easy" actually seeming to be way too hard for you. Struggling is normal. It gets easier.

- Textbooks meant for classrooms are generally worse than the combination of Tae Kim, reading practice, and google. Even if you're a complete beginner.

- If you want use Anki, make sure you do "mining" (making your own vocab cards from what you read) as soon as possible. And don't burn out. The last thing you want is to make yourself stop reading.

- Anki's default settings are broken. If you use Anki you need to fix them. http://wareya.moe/?blog/anki

- Don't be one of those people who memorizes 10k words before you start reading. It won't help. In fact it'll probably just crush your self esteem.