Speak everyday Japanese, one day at a time.
One short lesson a day, built on phrases you will actually use. The hiragana, katakana and kanji charts and the travel guides are free too.
Start Day 1, free →Words and characters together, from your review schedule.
Words stick when you review them at the right moment.
Everyone forgets new words. Spaced repetition brings each one back just before you would lose it, and every time you remember it, the gap before the next review gets longer. It is the most useful habit on this site.
Ten minutes a day does more than two hours once a week. Without an account, your schedule is saved only in this browser, on this device.
Every language you learn lets you talk with millions more people. This site is here to make the first step, which is the hardest, take ten minutes a day instead of a term of evening classes.
Read why I built this →Starting with kanji is the most common way to stall. It is the hardest part of Japanese and the worst place to begin. Here is the order that works, and how much time each step takes.
Hiragana is the basic alphabet, and everything else on this site is written with it. There are 46 characters, plus a few voiced and combined forms. Open the chart, tick a row, practise it, come back tomorrow. Keep the rōmaji switch on while you are learning the shapes, then turn it off once you can read them. Skip this step and you will still be reading rōmaji six months from now.
These are the phrases you would actually use: saying hello, giving your name, ordering food, asking where something is. Each day covers a few of them, explains why they work the way they do, then quizzes you. Do not binge three at once to get ahead. The day in between is doing half the work, because that is when things stick.
Spaced repetition is a flashcard deck that works out when to show you each word. You get 15 new ones a day, the useful ones first and mixed across categories, and each word comes back just before you would have forgotten it. If you only do one thing on this site, make it this. Ten minutes a day does more than two hours once a week. Do the cards even on days you skip the lesson.
Katakana is quicker than hiragana because you already know the sounds, just not the shapes. It pays off fast, because menus, station signs and every borrowed word use it. Kanji is the long one, so it has a course of its own: three or four characters a day for 30 days, each with its parts, a memory hook and two goes at writing it. Run it alongside the daily lessons rather than after them.
About 25 minutes, split three ways. One sitting or spread across the day, it makes little difference. Mornings are slightly better for the cards, because anything you get wrong comes back later the same day.
On a bad day, do the reviews and nothing else. Even four minutes keeps the schedule intact. Skip a day and tomorrow’s pile is bigger, which is how people end up staring at 200 cards and quietly giving up.
Different plan. Skip the alphabets for now and go straight to Situations: phrasebook guides for the restaurant, the station, the hotel, the convenience store. Keep rōmaji on, learn to spot a few katakana signs, and do the daily lessons with whatever time is left. Twenty phrases you can actually say will do more for you than half an alphabet.
Six courses. Daily lessons teach the phrases you would actually say, one short lesson at a time. The kanji course takes all 109 N5 characters in 30 days, with a memory hook and handwriting for each. Numbers covers counting, prices, times and dates properly. Business Japanese, anime and manga each take one kind of real Japanese and go at it properly.
Around them, Learn holds the reading, vocabulary and grammar references, and Practice has the spaced-repetition card deck and handwriting drills. Rōmaji and kana support switch on and off wherever they appear.
Jump straight to the situation you need, no course required.
How Japan celebrates Halloween: costumes rather than trick-or-treating, limited edition snacks, theme park seasons, a quieter Shibuya, and what to say.
More than you would expect. Every chart, all 831 words, the grammar reference, the situation guides, the printables and days 1 to 7 of the daily lessons, with no account and no card.
You pay only when you want the rest of the courses, unlimited reviews and everything released later.
Part of the Learn Languages Online network
Four of the eight sites are open: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Spanish. French, Italian, German and Portuguese are being built, with the same courses, spaced repetition and situation guides.