JLPT studies

Ok, so maybe you've heard about the JLPT, the "Japanese Language Proficiency Test". It's a standardized test to display a certain degree of knowledge about the Japanese language. Being standardized, many company or universities will judge your Japanese skills by the level you reached in the JLPT (it has 4 btw).

Well, btw, this is not what I want to talk about right now, so if you want to learn more, look here:
Wikipedia

What I want to talk about is this:
JLPT Studies

It's a site I've recently found. Well, the thing is, I never really found out which vocabs and grammar you need to learn for reaching the first JLPT level. Peter, the creator of JLPT studies luckily made this site with all the stuff you need on it. For the vocabulary you need for the first level for example you click here.

I don't really have the intention to attend the JLPT anytime soon, but it is a great direction you can follow if you don't know where to start. When I started learning Japanese, I listened to a lot of speaking and watched lots of Animes and looked up and learned the stuff and the words or sentence structures which struck my ear more often. This, on the other hand, is good since you exercise your ear in listening to the language, however, it can be pretty frustrating for a beginner not to know where to start. So if you are a rookie, just look through the first list of vocab and expressions and enter five or more per day into your spaced repetition system. If you are intermediate, go through the lists (starting from the lowest) and take all the stuff you didn't know yet. I suggest you copy all the words into Denshi Jisho and then click on "sentences" to get some examples.

However, the grammar on this page is pretty... strange and not good for learning (IMO). So I suggest the following (as in earlier posts): Get as many example sentence as possible and put them in your SRS. That way you don't have to learn grammar by heart, but get a feel for the language. Once you are more intermediate you can go to sites as Tae Kim's guide and look through more difficult structures, and then, again, get examples and learn them.

That said, have fun :)