I used JapanesePod 101 - they have a really nice series of lessons to learn both hiragana and katakana. I tried finding you a link but I think you will be able to locate it pretty easily.
I believe you can access it to that point for free though there are fees to use it at a higher level.
Also how I learned. Here’s the hiragana one: https://youtu.be/6p9Il_j0zjc?si=Q5FubzP6tfpBBhmB
Hiragana Learn Experiment… I’m shocked the app still exists, because I learned with it back almost 15 years ago, before I had any interest in actually studying Japanese (I just thought writing in letters nobody else could understand would be cool 
).
Excellent app for just getting the characters into your head, though. I used to just do a couple levels of it whenever I was on the bus or whatever, and the way it gets you to repeat writing them while associating them with the sound really worked well.
Now tell us what you used to learn Hangul, so I can read the menus in Korean restaurants!
I’m not sure if it still exists for free, but I used the official Memrise Korean course. As far as I remember, there isn’t romanization (or much at least) and you start by drilling the letters one by one with audio. I did this on my computer and it forced me to learn how to touch type in Korean as well.
Paper flashcards in a shoe box, because that’s the only tech that existed back then 
I also learned via Tofugu, but I believe it was an older resource of theirs that probably doesn’t exist anymore. 
I remember it having good mnemonics and me writing the characters over and over and over in a notebook, haha.
I suspect we share a country and ugh accepting the things that you can’t control is so hard. I just started reading Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh and it’s helping. I originally skipped to the last section which is about helping others, quickly found a passage saying that only people who already have a strong personal “peace” can sustainably help others, then gave myself permission to start from the beginning (which is about helping yourself).
That is awful, I’m so sorry for you and your community at the school. I also experienced something of an “indirect” loss recently and it was really confusing to understand my own emotional response to it. It sounds like the school is being really supportive for the kids; I hope the adults are equally able to get emotional support too.
And 2 months later, all my goals have fallen by the wayside, cuz 関西弁 lol
Otherwise all my focus is on getting an much Kansai-ben input as possible, shadowing, etc. I don’t think I need to state specific goals for that here
Dropping:
Woah, respect. I simply don’t know what to write about after a few days and the temptation to rely on LLMs to polish and articulate my thoughts in a foreign language is hard to resist.
I’ve been thinking of doing this lately. When I tried in the past, it was too hard for me - but I’ve got way more speaking experience now. So I’ve been thinking it would be good output practice, and I can use it to work on Kansai-ben as well
Anyway that’s really cool you’ve kept up with the writing daily. おめでとさん 
This is the hardest part!
Now some days I only write one paragraph, some times I write 4-5. So they’re not the world’s longest entries, and that helps conserve topics I guess.
And then you have Teppei who somehow manages to come up with things to talk about in a podcast every day for years on end. Sure, he repeats himself sometimes but it is nonetheless impressive.
I’m not going to hit this. It’s been another hard year and I stalled 3/4 of the way through 香君 and can’t be bothered to go back. If it was the whole story I would finish it, but I’m too exhausted to read the second book, so there’s no point in finishing the first book (which bizarrely ends mid-chapter). I don’t have any other regular novels on my radar either, so I don’t expect to start anything new. If I read any more Japanese books this year, it’ll probably just be more Silent Witch now that the anime is done.
This I will hit since I count 33 right now and don’t plan to buy any more manga this year. Dare say if I pick up one of the full series sets I have I could drop this down quite a bit. Those are こばと。 | L20 and 満月をさがして | L24, so I’d have to be in a shoujo mood to read those.
Ok, the final quarter of the year
reading daily
finished an adult level novel (digital)
draw down to 3-4 reads, and then it ballooned again. So I temporarily achieved this
105 kanji to go to reach my goal of 1000 total this year. I’ll get very close
I had a goal to practice writing weekly by the end of the year. I’ll let this goal go for now
I’ll focus on just the kanji goal and see how far I can get
Volume 1 ends on a big cliffhanger. I think it was to maximize its effect and keep the length of the volumes balanced.
