I thought I might blog my progress of learning japanese as well; so here is a short post about the utensils I use in order to learn- hm..
I think the most common japanese grammar book is the げんき (genki) series. I bought the grammar book as well as the workbook on amazon and i really like both of them. The genki book starts with a short introduction about the japanese writing system, the hiragana, katakana and the kanji and afterwards continues with the grammar part; always with some small tasks and a vocabulary list at the end of each lecture. However I highly recommend learning both, the hiragana and katakana before starting to learn the grammar!
You can learn them rather easily (it’s just a total of 200 characters), which one is able to learn in a matter of days actually. I got the Tuttle learning kit with hiragana and katakana flashcards; i think they cost around 15€ or even less. I only bought them because they were incredibly cheap. But i ended up liking them a lot. They come with a ring wich holds the cards together so you can learn pretty much everywhere. It really is quite conventient considering that there are still around 200 flash cards. Since i really liked the Tuttle version, i bought the same version for the first kanji kit as well but i didn’t really like the kanji version..(there was no reading on the back side of the flash cards and neither the radicals :/ )
Anyway, i’m already through the first few lectures of the genki book and am currently desperately trying to learn the kanji (i’m having a really hard time learing them) My ultimate goal still is to take the N4 JLPT Exam sometime next year.
And by the way, the internet site of the JLPT provides some really good vocabulary/grammar/kanji sheets for each level; they are a great help, if you aim to take the test!!
Here are some additional links that i found really helpful:
http://jisho.org (dictionary)
http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/jlpt5/ (above mentioned free resources for each JLPT level)
https://shop.whiterabbitjapan.com (online-shop for workbooks and other stuff)
http://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html (JLPT sample questions)
http://learnjapanesebod.tumblr.com (he explains the grammar really well!!)
