I started studying Japanese on the first of January 2022. I started with Genki textbooks for the first month, but later I was introduced to AJATT and Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis. The process I follow today boils down to priming with vocabulary flash cards and grammar study, then allocating the remainder (and majority) of study time consuming media in Japanese with minimal help from English: which is generally one-word lookups. It is most important to embrace the ambiguity.
My primary form of immersion is anime with native Japanese audio and subtitles when I can find them on kitsunekko. I read light novels as well, with occasional assistance from Yomitan. I’ve found reading light novels to be more effective than anime.
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is my only grammar resource. I tried Cure Dolly for a few weeks, but ultimately decided I prefer the written guide. I understand 10-20 minutes per day is sufficient as grammar study merely supplemnents immersion.
I use Anki to handle the scheduling of my flash cards. I’ve completed JP1K from Refold and the Core2.3k deck. I’ve moved on to mining, which is the longest stage of the process. This is where you immerse as usual, but look out for sentences that contain one or two words you’re unfamiliar with. These sentences are then turned into a flash card to be reviewed over the next few months/years.
Anki with the Ankiconnect plugin, which allows external programs to create and edit Anki cards.
mpv on its own is great. With the plugin mpvacious, mpv can communicate with Anki using AnkiConnect to supercharge sentence mining workflows. Furthermore, mpvacious can copy the current subtitle to your system clipboard.
And Yomitan which is a browser pop-up dictionary plugin. I use the Yomitan Search feature as it watches for and reads changes to clipboard contents, pastes it into the search bar, and allows you to look up individual words.
Tatsumoto Ren’s Path to Japanese Fluency