Learn Japanese

Start at the kana

The Japanese on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 491 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Japanese voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.

• 46hiragana
• 10digits
• 15pronunciation rules
• 300core words
• 60everyday phrases
• 60sentences

Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:

• か → が — two strokes (dakuten ゛) voice a kana: ka→ga, sa→za, ta→da, ha→baがっこう — school
• は → ぱ — a small circle (handakuten ゜) turns the h-row into pえんぴつ — pencil
• っ — a SMALL つ doubles the next consonant and adds a beat of silenceきって — postage stamp

Then material that does not run out

Once you are reading, the level is the point. The Text Generator writes Japanese at the CEFR level, length, topic and format you ask for, so the step up is a setting rather than a new book. Speaking scores you word by word as you read aloud. The Conversation Partner talks back. The Translator explains a sentence instead of replacing it, and the Corrector marks what you wrote and says why.

Above the on-ramp sits the Path — a station map from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and checkpoint stations — and Words & Notes, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in seven quiz styles.

What Japanese actually costs a beginner

Kanji is deliberately not taught as letters, because a kanji is a word rather than a sound and a card for one would have nothing honest to write as its pronunciation. It appears where it belongs: inside the words, phrases and sentences, spelled the way Japanese actually spells them, with the reading beside it. The other early hurdles are rhythmic rather than visual — the small tsu that doubles a consonant and adds a beat of silence, the long vowels that are two beats and not one, and the topic marker that is written ha and said wa. Every one of them is a card with a recorded voice, because none of them can be learned from the page.