For complete beginners
Start here
Everything on this site, in the order that actually works. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to buy — just the next thing to do.
Fifteen minutes a day is enough.
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1
Learn the sounds
About two weeks
Japanese has 107 syllable sounds, and every one of them here is recorded by a real person rather than a synthesiser. Begin with the 46 basic hiragana. Leave the voiced and combined sounds alone until the basic ones stop looking strange.
Hear a row, say it out loud, then take the quick check. Five sounds a day is plenty.
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2
Meet your first kanji
Alongside step 1, not after it
106 kanji notes covering the whole JLPT N5 set. Each one gives you the shape, a story for remembering it, its readings, and a real word it lives inside.
Don't drill these. Read two or three, then let the book bring them back to you in context.
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3
Read the book
The main event
52 illustrated pages that move from your first greeting to buying a train ticket, with 38 kanji taught inside scenes instead of lists, and three classmates learning it beside you. Free to read in your browser, in any of 21 languages.
One chapter per sitting. If a page feels heavy, it is doing something useful — go slower rather than skipping it.
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4
Keep it warm
For the days you have no time
Ten one-minute lessons, twelve travel phrase cards for a real trip, and printable charts for the fridge door. This is what keeps a gap of a few days from turning into a gap of a few months.
Where this gets you
- Read and write both hiragana and katakana
- Recognise the full JLPT N5 kanji set and the words it hides in
- Greet someone properly, and introduce yourself to a stranger
- Ask where something is, order food, and read a price
- Make sense of a train sign, a shop sign, and a menu
This is the ground JLPT N5 covers. It won't sit the exam for you — you'd want more listening and reading practice for that — but if you finish this path, none of N5 will be unfamiliar.
What's waiting for you here
- 107
- hiragana sounds, each voiced by a person
- 106
- kanji notes — the whole N5 set
- 52
- illustrated book pages
- 21
- languages the book is readable in
- 10
- one-minute interactive lessons
- 12
- printable travel phrase cards
All of it free, with no account, and no page that asks you to finish something else first.
Written and drawn by Cesar Borgenkrans — a Japanologist in Stockholm with a degree in Japanese, Japan Foundation-funded research behind him, and hundreds of learners taught, from age eight to adult. More about that here. If something on this path helps — or doesn't — tell me.