Reddit reviews Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference
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Hey! Good to see someone interested in East Asian languages! The CJKV writing system normally throws a lot of people off.
CJK Writing System
I wrote a short little rant a while back on how the characters are constructed that you might want to read.
There are methods of learning the characters that make use of their structure. Heisig's RtK and RtH books (Amazon link) are the most well known books I think. Fansites such as Reviewing the Kanji and Reviewing the Hanzi also exist which you might want to take a look at.
Not sure if you like RtK? Here's the sampler. See if you like it after learning 276 characters~
Chinese-Specific
The only thing headache inducing about any Chinese dialect is the writing system and tones.
Note that though we call them "dialects", it is a matter of politics as most of them are mutually unintelligible. A Cantonese or Mandarin speaker is unlikely to understand a Hokkien speaker at all, for example.
Written chinese, on the other hand, is in Mandarin and only in Mandarin -- the other dialects do not have writing systems. Well... the notable exception is Written Cantonese, but that's can be seen as a variant of standard written chinese.
Oh! There are have two variants of the standard writing system: Simplified and Traditional. I had learnt the former in school, and I can read the latter after learning about the simplification process, so just pick one and stick with it.
I personally find Mandarin grammar to quite simple. This might be because it's an isolating language.
Japanese-Specific
Japanese folk have an easier time with Chinese characters. While 6000 Hanzi is roughly college-level (I think?) in Chinese, 6000 Kanji in Japanese is probably more-than-you-need-to-know-ever. There is a Kanji Aptitude Test which is pretty much the only reason one would learn that many.
However, Japanese also have two syllabaries you'll need to know (~50 syllables each). These are phonetic, so they shouldn't pose much of a challenge; most who learn Japanese learn both of them in one or two weeks.
Essential:
Beginner resources:
Books to get:
Mixed collection of Online Resources:
issue with sentence order? Sentence order isn't important, as long as the verb is at the end it's correct. The rest is mostly subtle inflections and phrasing. That is the benefit of particles. English is very sentence order focused, Japanese is not. However if you want examples galore to help you garner a better understanding then i can recommend this book
there is a book on Japanese sentence patterns, Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication.
It is the closest I can think of for what you want. But as someone else said learning a language takes time, you aren't just going to be able convert English to Japanese and sound natural by using a book or an app. If it was that easy, google translate wouldn't be so entertaining in it's mistranslations.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1568364202/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495461694&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=japanese+sentence+patterns+for+effective+communication&dpPl=1&dpID=51NMVyrYjKL&ref=plSrch
No problem, here ya go. :)
I tried Genki as a complete self-learner but wasn't able to stick with it past a few chapters. I think it being classroom oriented was part of the problem. I kept skipping parts that involved practicing with other students. Overall I lost interest for some reason. I may try going back to it someday.
There were a couple books that were really helpful for me learning grammar. One is "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication":
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1568364202/
It has 142 sentence patterns that cover a lot of practical grammar that I found useful when visiting Japan. I entered all the sentences into Anki, which ended up being 1160 cards. For each card I added notes about the pattern from the book. I found that using flashcards was the most effective way for me to remember the material.
The other book, which other people have mentioned, is Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. This book is awesome and has great explanations that are hard to find elsewhere. I started with the Anki deck but suspended all the cards initially. When I encountered some grammar I didn't understand I would look it up in the dictionary, unsuspend the cards and apply some edits (there are some mistakes in the cards). I would also add useful notes from the book in additional fields.
Whoa it's out of print and hard to get a hold of? That's interesting. (edit: I just checked Amazon, it seems to be in stock.) Anyway, I have that book, and it was amazing. It was instrumental in helping me with grammar a few years back when I was actively going to the JLPT. I highly recommend it.
I have another book, 'A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns,' which is similar. It covers a lot of the same topics as Effective Communication, but it's unnecessarily complicated in its presentation, IMO. Still a good alternative if you can't find Effective Communication.
Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication was my favorite grammatical resource when I was an intermediate student. It's a great way to brush up on and get a feel for all the basic grammatical patterns.
For forming sentences, you need to start with some basic sentence patterns. This is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Sentence-Patterns-Effective-Communication/dp/1568364202.