I’ve been studying Japanese for many years, with long pauses in between. My recent goal is to be able to read books in Japanese and be able to watch lectures in Japanese about my favorite art topics. I tried different courses and platforms, I learned Kanji stand alone thinking that they would have helped to guess the meaning of Japanese sentences, but with my beginner grammar knowledge I soon found out that I couldn’t understand even the manga for kids. I’ve been told I should reach the N3 level of JPLT to be able to start understanding those. So I googled for the best grammar courses and one of those was Chika Sensei. Compared to other online courses where you’re left to your own devices, this one was not cheap, but the idea to have a teacher following your progresses or to whom ask questions has been my deciding factor. And I’m glad I did. I bought first the N4 course, thinking that my basic grammar and vocabulary was covering the N5, but I soon found out that N4 was too difficult for me and I didn’t know a few grammar rules, so after a while I decided to start from square one with the N5 course, as a refresher and a mean to fill my gaps for grammar. It’s actually challenging in a good way, it helps me writing sentences thinking in Japanese, looking for words I was missing. It gives me a lot of insights on the particle usage I wasn’t aware of, a sort of more advanced usage compared to the basic one I read in the usual grammar books so far. Even though the lessons are 10 minutes long, there are many other activities to go through as soon as possible, such as learning vocabulary (and there is a nice companion platform to quiz you on that, that it’s not the usual SRS flashcard – by the way, it’s one of the possibilities if needed), learning Kanji and so forth. There are different kind of lessons that follows a program and arriving every day as an email: grammar, listening, reading and monthly videos. The dialogues and the sentences are very up to date with modern life, common situations, and not resembling the ones on textbooks.
I’m still impressed by the competence and the hard work of the teacher who corrects the homework and asks questions to follow up.
In the comments for every lesson there are other students’ homework, questions and corrections that I personally found very useful to learn something new or be aware of mistakes that can happen.
Overall I would recommend this course to advanced beginners or beginners who are motivated to work on learning hiragana and katakana as the first step.