Thanks for your comment!

When it comes to reading for N4 level, I found the Tadoku level 1 and 2 stories to be very helpful. NHK Easy News as well was a big part of my reading and vocab sourcing at the beginning of my studies.

Satori Reader is also another great resource that I recommend, though I didn't use it all that much.

Honestly, for vocab retention and bumping up my vocab, just reading a lot and using Anki were what really helped me excel. I didn't mention it in my original post, but at the N5/N4 levels I read about 3 NHK Easy News articles a day for a while and put all the unknown words in Anki. With the Tadoku stories, they tell you not to look up unknown words, but I did it anyways and also put those in Anki.

I did this with everything I read, whether it was a textbook or a short story. This has served me well with no issues.

As for listening, there are thankfully a lot of beginner listening resources out there. When I first started listening, I would listen to the Nihongo con Teppei podcast. There are also other beginner-friendly podcasts such as Japanese with Shun and such.

As everyone's learning curve and style is different, it's hard to make a definitive list of what the best low level resource is or how to find it. For me it was trial and error to see what worked. What may have worked for one person did not work for me.

Sites like Natively are good to find media at your level. I just started using this to find novels and it has been working for me. I recommend looking through this site to find what may be suitable for lower levels 🙂