Japanese for Beginners: Advice and Guide to Get Started

So, you want to learn Japanese? Here are a few tools and some honest advice for learning Japanese efficiently.

ようこそ！

TheJapanesePage.com Tip: nearly all the Japanese on this site has a recording. Take the time to listen — repeatedly — to each new word or phrase. Try to “shadow” the sounds: first repeat after the speaker, then speak along with the speaker. Go ahead, try it now with ようこそ, which means “welcome.” Got it? Good. Do that with every lesson and both your pronunciation and your vocabulary will improve.

To learn any language, you need these things:

• Motivation — Remember why you want to learn Japanese. Maybe it was an anime that made Japanese seem cool, or a Japanese person you met. Whatever sparked your desire, revisit that reason often — it will carry you through the plateaus when progress feels painfully slow. Then visualize your goal: imagine yourself chatting with native speakers in Japan, or reading a Japanese newspaper on the shinkansen. Your motivations point you toward your goals.
• Consistency — Study every day, even if only for a few minutes. And don’t forget to review! I highly recommend the Anki flashcard app (see below) for daily review.
• Humility and curiosity — Embrace mistakes; they are part of the process. “Adults can’t learn foreign languages” is simply not true — adults just have to be child-like learners: inquisitive, willing to try things out, and quick to correct.
• Focus — Remove distractions. Discipline is key.

I won’t sugar-coat it: for a native English speaker, Japanese is hard — much harder than, say, Spanish. The sad reality is that most beginners of Japanese remain beginners forever. Kanji is an obvious hurdle, but so are the very different grammar, sentence structure, and honorifics. But if you maintain motivation and curiosity, build a consistent daily study habit, and learn from your mistakes, you will get there — and you’ll have the deep satisfaction of achieving something genuinely difficult.

It all starts with your first step.

The bear above has some good advice. She says 一歩一歩(いっぽいっぽ) — “one step, one step.” Take your language-learning journey one step at a time.

All of the above is important, I can hear you say, but are you ever going to get to the Japanese lessons? Right! Specifics in a moment — but let me repeat myself one last time: a positive, inquisitive mindset and consistent daily practice are critical to your success.

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One last thing before the specifics: please consider signing up for our newsletter. It’s totally free, you can unsubscribe at any time, and you’ll get a few freebies instantly — two of our eBooks (with sound files) at no charge. I (Clay) usually send a few educational emails a week.

How to Use TheJapanesePage.com + Other Tools

Here is our suggested path for the absolute beginner. Everything linked below is absolutely free (except Anki for iPhone, a textbook, and our two paid recommendations: our Complete Beginner Bundle and Makoto+).

Learn Hiragana — Learning to read, starting with hiragana, is essential. This foundation supports all your future learning. Depending on how much time you put in, you can learn hiragana in less than two weeks — and you’ll learn core Japanese pronunciation along the way. Spend plenty of time here; everything you learn from now on builds on it.

Click Here to Learn Hiragana for Free

Finish reading this page, then come back to that link to get started!

Although not as immediately important, I highly recommend learning katakana right after hiragana. The two share similarities that can make them tricky to tell apart, but katakana is much easier to pick up while hiragana is fresh in your mind. Already know hiragana? Head to our Katakana Master Lesson page.

Pay attention to the sounds and rhythm of Japanese. Understanding pitch accents, long vowels, and the small つ will train your ears and prevent pronunciation mistakes.

One last point: stay clear of romaji (Japanese written with the alphabet). Real Japanese simply isn’t written that way, and romaji quickly becomes a crutch — why do the hard work of learning hiragana and kanji when the alphabet is right there? You’ll need a little romaji to first learn hiragana, but once you have the characters down, throw romaji away and never look back.

While not as harmful as romaji, furigana can also become a crutch once you start learning kanji. Furigana is the small hiragana written above kanji to show the pronunciation:

Useful — sometimes necessary — but most native Japanese material has no furigana. That’s why TheJapanesePage.com (and MakotoPlus.com) automatically hides the furigana over kanji. Don’t worry! To see the reading, just mouse over (or tap) the kanji and the furigana appears. Think of it as tough love: learn hiragana, stay clear of romaji, and use furigana sparingly.

Download Anki for your computer and/or phone. Anki is the world’s most popular spaced-repetition flashcard app — it shows you the cards you struggle with more often than the ones you know well. Best of all, it’s free (except the iPhone app, which is a little pricey but worth it in my opinion).

You can use any of the many ready-made decks (all free), but I highly recommend building your own. Don’t be lazy! Every time you meet a new word or phrase in your daily reading, add it to your personal deck — 4–5 new items a day is plenty. Clear your deck. Every. Single. Day! And even when you only want to learn a single word, add a full phrase or sentence so you memorize context and usage, not just the word.

Order a good textbook — I define “good” as any textbook you will actually use daily. A textbook keeps your learning structured. You can learn Japanese without one (and TheJapanesePage.com will certainly help you along the way), but a textbook is a more direct path through the basics.

After the basics… I used to think following a textbook through the upper-intermediate stage was best. I now believe that once you have basic grammar and sentence structure, moving to native input sooner rather than later wins. That could be anime, podcasts, Japanese YouTubers…

“But Clay, it’s too hard!” Fair — the rule is that input should sit just a little above your current level. It’s fine to train your ears with anime and mine it for Anki phrases, but if you understand less than half of what’s said, graded readers are the better tool — like our digital bundles, which use native text and audio but explain the grammar and define the words. Once you’re intermediate, move to mostly (if not all) native material.

Popular textbook choices: Genki, Tobira, Japanese for Busy People, and Japanese from Zero. We stock Genki here and the newer Tobira here — both highly recommended — but honestly there are cheaper options that work just as well (again: if you use it). Japanese for Busy People is probably the cheapest (skip the romanized version!), and Japanese from Zero is very popular too.

There has never been a better time to learn Japanese. When I started in 1998, I bought a very expensive standalone electronic dictionary; today there are free online dictionaries with many times the entries. A few favorites:

• Anki — mentioned above, and worth repeating: repetition is the mother of learning. Makoto+ members get ready-made Anki decks with most lessons (more of my thoughts on Anki here).
• Yomitan (the community-maintained successor to Yomichan) — a browser plugin that lets you look up any Japanese word or kanji on any web page, with a pitch-accent add-on available. As a total beginner, wait on pitch accents until you’ve mastered the kana — then read this.
• Our FREE podcasts — we produce two weekly shows. Nihongo no Tane is for intermediates; as a beginner, subscribe to Beginning Japanese Phrases. Makoto+ members get transcripts and other podcast extras.
• FREE daily email courses — several courses, each email designed to take under five minutes. Consider the Kanji, Vocabulary, and Grammar courses; copy the kanji and vocabulary onto a notepad, and add anything interesting to your Anki deck. A daily email is a great consistency nudge.

Input Before Output

We recommend focusing on input (listening, reading) before output (speaking) — roughly 80% input, 20% output. Without a healthy store of input, your output will… not be good. How could it be? If you don’t yet know the words you need or how they fit together naturally, you can’t speak understandable Japanese. Build a large vocabulary and a feel for sentence structure first; speaking then grows out of it naturally.

That said, I understand wanting to speak immediately! This page has 100 common conversational phrases — listen and repeat after the speaker. All 100 are extremely useful.

TheJapanesePage.com Super Pages

We have a growing number of “Super Pages” — pages that each cover one topic well, with lots of audio practice:

• Basic Beginning Japanese Phrases — once you know hiragana, start making friends with phrases you can use immediately. Our audio-only lessons are great while washing dishes or walking the dog. No pressure to memorize — learning vocabulary (and kanji) is like meeting someone: you don’t become best friends immediately.
• (Very) Basic Grammar — while learning phrases, start introducing yourself to these 100 core grammar points. Don’t worry about mastering each one; just get familiar. There’s also a free daily Grammar email course.
• JLPT N5 Pages — get acquainted with basic kanji early. (JLPT = Japanese Language Proficiency Test, held worldwide twice a year; N5 is the easiest level, N1 the hardest.) N5 covers about a hundred kanji — know even just their meanings and you’ll be amazed how much you can read.
• How to Count to a Million — Japanese numbers and counting.
• TJP Podcasts — two weekly podcasts for beginners and intermediates. Subscribe free.
• Japanese Prefectures — language and culture are hard to separate, and Japanese is only widely spoken in Japan, so learning about Japan is a must. Start with geography!

At this point you know hiragana, some basic grammar, and some basic vocabulary. The best way to improve is to read, read, and read some more. But native texts at this level are a recipe for frustration — that’s exactly why most of our books are stories written for beginners to lower-intermediates. Here are a few free stories right here on TJP. Like them? Makoto+ (below) has many, many more.

More Digital Bundles at TheJapanShop.com — we bundle our books by topic and level at deep discounts on our sister site. If you want to start smaller, the Beri-Beri Shoshinsha bundle focuses purely on total-beginner material: hiragana, katakana, beginning kanji, and beginner-level stories.

Find Money-Saving Digital Bundles

MakotoPlus.com

Once you know hiragana well and have a feel for basic grammar and vocabulary, consider one of the paid tiers. You’ll get the monthly Makoto e-zine plus several weekly lessons:

Makoto+ Samurai Members

Cost: $5 a month

• Download and keep the latest Makoto magazine (eBook version)
• Download and keep bonus content for TheJapanesePage.com lessons, including Anki decks, printable PDFs, and sound files
• Bonus content for all our podcasts (transcripts and audio downloads)
• Exclusive weekly sentence breakdowns and lessons
• More-or-less monthly freebies — eBooks with PDF, ePub, and sound files (usually plus an Anki deck)
• Exclusive, reusable 10% off coupon for anything at TheJapanShop.com

Makoto+ Shogun Members + Lifetime Members

Cost: $10 a month, or a one-time payment of $299

• Everything in Samurai, plus…
• Access to ALL Makoto issues in web format (downloads are for issues released during your membership)
• Access to ALL past weekly sentence breakdowns and lessons
• Many exclusive lessons: haiku breakdowns, tongue twisters, and much more
• Web versions of many of our books with interactive sound
• Everything else at MakotoPlus.com!
• Exclusive, reusable 20% off coupon for anything at TheJapanShop.com

Learn More about Makoto+　Or Start Free