What should I study next in Japanese?

Question:

I know katakana and hiragana perfectly, and my vocabulary is probably around 100 words, but I don't know many verbs, and I'm struggling to figure out which part of Japanese I should focus on. I know some of the particles, but not all of them. Should I learn some more words before I study all of the particles, or would it be best to just start studying verb conjugation?

I started Kanji a few days ago, but I realized I'm still not learning the language the way I want to. I want to move closer to understanding what people say before I learn to read all of the Kanji, but every time I listen to Japanese dialogue, it's way too fast and I only know about 5% of the words they're saying, not to mention the weird phrases and grammar they use.

Sorry to rant, I'm just getting really frustrated. What should I focus on that will help me to start understanding spoken Japanese better?

Answer:

I would recommend studying vocabulary to a comprehensible level before moving on to grammar. Therefore, when you finally do know the grammar (particles, phrases etc), then you would be able to construct sentences around said particles: Using the learned vocabulary.

In terms of what kind of vocabulary you should learn, all of them is the simply answer. I first studied verbs and their conjugations (which are incredible easy to learn, with only two exceptions), and it helped me to understand the basic structure of sentences. Then I learned (some) adjectives, just to accompany the nouns which I learned after. I actually found a '1300 most common words in Japanese' (Mostly nouns) on the internet, which enabled me to understand/write/convey a lot of vocabulary. Amazingly, only 1000 words are needed to understand 87 percent of all spoken language! And a substantial quantity of written language.

Particles should come later, and will likely be learned passively through listening and reading. However, it is of course useful to learn them.

Good luck! <3