By this point, you should be able to read hiragana and understand a few hundred(400-600) Japanese vocabulary words.  Now it’s probably time to start to practice reading Japanese Sentences.

This is is really where everything comes together and very soon, you’ll begin to have some facility for communicating in Japanese.  This is the meat of the Japanese Sentence method and what you’ll spend most of your time doing from now on.  Previous steps have been useful getting you to this point, but this is where the real magic happens.

Just like training in sports where the best way to get better at your sport is to practice your sport,  the best way to get better at speaking and understanding Japanese Sentences is to… practice speaking and understanding Japanese Sentences.  As a bonus, of course, this will reinforce the vocabulary and kana that we have learned up until now AND you’ll be learning different grammar structures as you go.

Some sentences won’t make sense at first either because you won’t know all of the vocabulary, or because you don’t understand the grammar.  What I usually do is mark the card and proceed with more new cards.  Then I’ll go back about once a week (or so) and look up the vocabulary(yomichan) or grammar(tae kim or wikipedia) for all of the marked cards.  I suggest looking things up “as you go” from now on, instead of “studying” tae kim specifically, at least until you have gone through a few thousand cards.  Of course you can do it however you want, but I find it more efficient for me to learn by example how grammar works rather then study all of the rules and try to apply them.  There has been much written about this, so don’t take my word for it.  If I have a few extra minutes free after studying my sentences for the day, sometimes I’ll read a chapter or two of Tae Kim just to solidify what I already know, but most of my grammar is learned by example.