Learn Japanese
Japanese writes with three scripts at once, which is why so many people stall in the first week. iLexiBox starts with one of them. The beginner path is the 46 basic hiragana and nothing else — phonetic, complete, and the script every reading aid is made of — with each card carrying its katakana twin, so the two sets are met together rather than twice.
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. Make a text 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. Lexi talks back. The Translator fixes your mistakes as it translates and can give a simpler version at your level, and Writing marks what you wrote and says why.
Above the on-ramp sits the Course — a map of practice steps from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and a level test at the top of each level — and My words, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in eight quiz styles.
2,720 photographs, 2,707 of them captioned in Japanese
The album is a photograph for every word, shelved by category, each caption written in Japanese and spoken in a real recorded voice rather than synthesised on the fly. It doubles as a game: see the picture, spell the word. Free to replay.
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.
Full courses in English and German (A1–C1); Norwegian growing level by level; first lessons in Spanish; picture album in 37 languages; tools and AI practice in 54.