Japanese

were the hell are you meant to start

Click the “Learn” button than “+ New Course”, choose your level and find any course you like.

If I were going to start Japanese from scratch, I’d first of all get a handle on Hiragana, and slowly learn some Kanji while studying the very basics of the language. There’s a nifty tablet app for learning Hiragana and Kanji, but I’m struggling to remember the name now. Anyway, there are hundreds of free apps to help you learn that. Get one of those, and don’t forget to use paper and pen/pencil. At least for me, writing them down by hand really helped at the time.

As for LingQ’s library, you can filter the Beginner 1 lessons. Pick one of the courses in there, and dive in. Don’t forget that you can and should use other resources along with LingQ, like memrise.com, youtube videos, etc. Japanese is a language with plenty of free resources out there.

Here’s a free course with audio, for example: Free FSI Japanase Language Courses - Japanese Fast and Japanese Headstart

Learn kana first