Japanese · 日本語

Study hub

Honest start (first 30 days)

Pick one lane and keep it for a month: hiragana/katakana fluency, ~300 high-frequency words, and graded listening you finish. Delay a kanji binge. Romanization is a temporary crutch — schedule its retirement.

Week-by-week month

1. Week 1 — Finish kana with the script trainer; 20 First-500 words/day recognition.
2. Week 2 — Add katakana + survival phrases; 15 minutes graded audio daily.
3. Week 3 — Invent five spoken sentences/day from First 500; one short tutor or language-exchange turn.
4. Week 4 — Introduce 5–10 kanji via components (not 100 isolated characters); re-listen week-1 audio without romanization.

Japanese-specific traps

• Kanji collection as productivity theatre.
• Anime-only input with no finishable graded audio.
• Politeness chaos — learn a small desu/masu toolkit before slang.
• SRS decks larger than your speaking practice.

After A2

Graduate toward NHK Easy → short native news with retell. Keep components as your “root family” analogue. Use topic decks for travel/food, not random scrapes.

Daily 25-minute template

1. 5 min — script or pronunciation warm-up.
2. 10 min — First 500 or topic deck.
3. 10 min — listening you finish + 30-second retell.

Resource use on this site

Start with one free course from the list below, one listening habit, and one reference. Use on-site tools linked above. Ignore the rest of the directory until those three habits are alive for two weeks.

Progress checks

• Can you decode the script without romanization?
• Can you finish a graded clip and retell three facts?
• Have you spoken — even badly — four times this month?

A solid practice day

Pick five high-frequency words or phrases, say one sentence with each aloud, finish a short graded clip that might contain them, and write a brief diary line. If the clip is too hard, step down one level — don’t open another app.