How to learn Japanese: a getting-started guide

1. Learn hiragana and katakana. A few days to a week each. Reading them, not writing them.
2. Install Anki and start Kaishi 1.5k, a free deck of the 1,500 most useful words, at 10–20 new words a day.
3. Read one short grammar explanation a day from a single beginner guide. Don't try to memorise it.
4. Start immersing now, not later. An hour or two a day of anime, manga, YouTube, visual novels or graded readers, with Japanese subtitles or a pop-up dictionary.
5. When Kaishi runs out, make your own cards from words you meet in what you read and watch.
6. Keep going every day. Hours of understood Japanese are what make you better; everything else exists to make those hours possible.

Short on time, or learning for one thing in particular? The routine chapter has a plan for 30–45 minutes a day and notes on what to emphasise if your goal is anime, novels, travel or work.

Read them in order the first time; after that, jump to whatever you're stuck on. Links marked with an arrow go to other sites and open in a new tab, so you won't lose your place.

1. Chapter 1Kana and pronunciationLearn to read both kana scripts in days, not months, and get the sounds of Japanese right from the start: charts, spelling quirks, the mora rhythm, and the handful of sounds English speakers get wrong.
2. Chapter 2Vocabulary and AnkiWhy the first thousand words matter so much, how to set up Anki with FSRS and the Kaishi 1.5k deck, how to review without fooling yourself, and when to stop using pre-made decks.
3. Chapter 3KanjiHow kanji are built and read, why learning them through words works, the three routes learners take (and what each costs), and when to learn to write them.
4. Chapter 4GrammarGrammar as a map, not a checklist: the core ideas of Japanese sentences, how to study grammar in passes, and an honest comparison of the free guides, videos and textbooks.
5. Chapter 5Sounding naturalWhy textbook Japanese sounds stiff, and what real speech does instead: plain forms, contractions, dropped particles, sentence-ending particles, fillers and back-channelling, onomatopoeia, slang, anime role language, Kansai dialect and when politeness still matters.
6. Chapter 6Immersion and toolsComprehensible input without the hype, when to start, active and passive listening, intensive and extensive reading, why you don't understand what you hear, and the free tools that make native content readable.
7. Chapter 7What to watch and readBeginner-friendly podcasts, YouTube channels, graded readers, anime, films, manga, visual novels, games and books, ranked by measured difficulty from Jiten.moe, with the all-ages status of every visual novel checked, and a finder that filters every title in the guide.
8. Chapter 8Speaking and pitch accentWhen to start speaking, what to practise before your first conversation, how to get something out of tutors and exchanges, pitch accent explained, and learning to write.
9. Chapter 9Routine and milestonesSample routines for your first week and first months, a plan for 30–45 minutes a day, what to emphasise if your goal is anime, novels, travel or work, milestones, what to do when progress feels invisible, and how to stay consistent through bad weeks.
10. Chapter 10IntermediateWhat intermediate means, why progress seems to slow down, and what to change: reading volume, Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, casual listening, grammar review and first conversations, with a ranked list of anime, dramas, manga, books and games for this stage.
11. Chapter 11Upper intermediateWhen most entertainment is comfortable but some things still aren't: fast group talk, specialist dramas, long novels, native radio and podcasts. How to widen your range, speed up reading and start producing natural Japanese, with harder recommendations.
12. Chapter 12AdvancedThe long road past N1: modern and Meiji-era literature, news and editorials, keigo you can actually use, formal writing, idioms and four-character compounds, dialects, classical Japanese and kanji proficiency, and the hardest popular media.

Japanese is a long project for an English speaker. The US Foreign Service Institute places it in its hardest group, around 2,200 classroom hours to professional working proficiency, and flags it as harder than the other languages in that group. Three writing systems, a word order that runs the other way, and very little shared vocabulary all add up.

The JLPT, and how many hours

The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (opens in a new tab) is the standard certificate: five levels, sat in July and December. It tests reading and listening only, and its organisers no longer publish word or kanji lists for each level. The Japanese Language Education Center's survey of learners (2010–2015, as cited on Wikipedia) gives a feel for the hours involved:

Learners who already read Chinese characters need less: about half as long for N1. The exact numbers matter less than the scale: the path is measured in thousands of hours, and daily immersion is how people fit thousands of hours into a life.

Milestones people report

Those assume an hour or two a day. TheMoeWay puts it in terms of volume instead: after about ten anime series watched raw you start to get the hang of listening; after your first novel you leave the beginner stage. A Year to Learn Japanese describes the first big turning point as the “nope threshold”: the day native content stops being unbearable and becomes merely hard. Everything before it is about getting there sooner.

A little orientation makes everything after it less mysterious.

• Three scripts, mixed in every sentence. Kanji carry the meaning of most nouns and the stems of verbs and adjectives; hiragana writes grammar, endings and particles; katakana writes loanwords, names and emphasis. Romaji is for foreigners and isn't used in normal writing.
• No spaces. Words run together, and the switch between kanji and kana is what shows you where they begin and end. That's why text written only in kana is harder to read than it looks.
• Five vowels, few sounds. a, i, u, e, o, and every kana is one equal beat. Pronunciation is the easy part of Japanese for most English speakers.
• The verb comes last. The basic order is subject, object, verb, and small words called particles after each piece mark its role.
• Less grammar than you'd fear in some places. Nouns have no gender, no articles and usually no plural. Subjects are dropped whenever context makes them obvious: 日本に行きました is simply “(I) went to Japan.”
• Politeness is built into verbs. 食べます and 食べる both mean “eat”; the first is polite, the second plain. Textbooks start polite; anime and manga are mostly plain.

The grammar chapter goes further, including the particle everyone wonders about, は versus が.