Learn Japanese

I liked this:

https://www.japanese-like-a-breeze.com/guide-for-beginners/

I modified the card templates though. I can't remember what the default was, but it was nice fore a week

It starts simple and it's all from anime. Their more advanced decks are paid for but this beginner deck follows most of the grammar points in "A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar" by Tae Kim:

https://www.open-of-course.org/courses/file.php/62/index.html

If you just want a single app to focus on for now, Renshuu is probably the best option. It has different flashcard stuff, grammar info, games.

Some others I think are worth mentioning: Kanji Kohii (foss Kanji mnemonic and SRS app), bunpro (collects grammar resources), JPDB (combines dictionary, flashcard decks, kanji in a cohesive way).

There are a ton of other great resources too. Check out Sakubi's Guide, A Year to Learn Japanese, and DJT's guide. Others too, like Tofugu's or moe's. Read through one and you'll get tons of go-forward ideas.

Eventually you'll wind up wanting to use Anki and immersing with listening and reading. This post is already too long, but definitely keep those in mind as you make your plans.

I really like Cure Dolly's approach though the videos are a bit difficult to understand with her accent and the quality which is why I linked the transcript, I find that more useful anyway personally. Her approach to the language really clicked for me though. That and the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck for vocabulary has gotten me pretty far.

I think also immersion is super important. Once you learn the kana, you can jump right in to reading with some free, simple books for children at Tadoku and use jisho.org to look stuff up. It's slow work but very rewarding imo. I'm doing manga translations now for practice after working through some of those. I also watch anime and try to ignore the subtitles and listen for common phrases and whatnot as listening is a separate skill that needs to be trained.

One thing I actually think apps like Duolingo are good at is teaching the kana, which is usually the biggest hurdle most people seem to have in the beginning. I used Duolingo for that and it helped me at first but it does a bad job with everything else IMO, especially grammar. I'm sure there are other apps for teaching hiragana and katakana, or an Anki deck probably exists too if that's preferable.

I'm far from functional with the language but in the year I've been studying (honestly pretty lazily) I've improved a lot and I haven't spent a dime.