How to learn Japanese on your own: kana first, kanji without panic, a plan to JLPT

You can learn Japanese on your own, and the order that works is well known: hiragana in the first week or two, katakana right after, then the polite です/ます Japanese with its particles, the first 500 to 1,000 words, and kanji added a few a day inside words you already know. Grammar is more regular than its reputation; the writing system is what makes Japanese long. For an English speaker it is one of the longest languages to learn, so plan in months, measure in levels, and keep the daily slot sacred.

Key points

• Read kana before anything else, and stop using romaji as soon as you can.
• Kanji are learned through words, not as a list of 2,000 symbols. A few a day is enough.
• Start with the polite です/ます forms and use them with everyone; casual speech comes later.
• Anime and manga are fuel for listening and reading, not a model of how to talk to strangers.

Weeks 1 to 3: hiragana and katakana

Japanese is written with three scripts at once. Hiragana (46 basic characters) writes grammar endings and native words; katakana (another 46, the same sounds in sharper shapes) writes loanwords and foreign names; kanji write the roots of most words. Each kana is a syllable: か (ka), き (ki), く (ku). Two small marks turn them into new sounds (か ka, が ga; は ha, ぱ pa), and small ゃ, ゅ, ょ make combinations like きゃ (kya).

A realistic plan: hiragana in seven to ten days, ten characters a day, read in real words from the first day. Then katakana in a week, which goes faster because you already know the sounds and katakana words are often English in disguise: コーヒー (kōhī, coffee), テレビ (terebi, TV), パン (pan, bread, from Portuguese). The hiragana chart and the katakana chart show every character with its stroke order. Romaji is a ladder for these days, not a place to live: after three weeks, reading it slows you down. How to make any new script stick is in learning a new alphabet.

The sounds: easy at first, then the details

Japanese has five vowels, a, i, u, e, o, all short and clean, and few consonant clusters, so first words come out understandable fast. The details that change meaning:

• Length. A long vowel is a different word: おばさん (obasan) is an aunt, おばあさん (obāsan) a grandmother; ビル (biru) is a building, ビール (bīru) beer.
• The small っ, a held beat before a consonant: きて (kite), come, and きって (kitte), a stamp.
• Rhythm. Japanese counts beats (mora), not syllables, and each beat takes about the same time: にほん (Nihon) has three.
• Pitch. There is no stress, but there is a high-low melody: はし said high-low is chopsticks, low-high is a bridge. Copy the melody from audio; do not try to memorise it.
• Quiet vowels. In です (desu) and します (shimasu) the final u is barely heard, which is why it sounds like "dess".

Practise these as pairs, the way minimal pairs work for any language.

Kanji without panic

The official list of characters for everyday use, the jōyō kanji, has 2,136 entries; Japanese children learn 1,026 of them in primary school. You need neither number in your first year. What works:

• Learn kanji inside words. 学 means study, but you remember it from 学生 (gakusei, student) and 大学 (daigaku, university).
• Expect two kinds of reading. 山 is yama alone (native reading) and san in 富士山 (Fujisan); 人 is hito alone and jin in 日本人 (nihonjin). The word tells you which.
• Simple and frequent first. Numbers, days, people, places, the verbs you use: 日, 月, 人, 山, 行, 見, 食.
• Three to five a day, reviewed with spaced repetition, is a pace you can keep. The JLPT no longer publishes kanji lists, but the old test's guidelines put about 100 kanji at the beginner level and about 2,000 at the top, and learners still use those figures as a rough map.

Grammar: word order, particles and politeness

The verb comes last. 私はコーヒーを飲みます (watashi wa kōhī o nomimasu): I-topic coffee-object drink. Tense, negation and politeness all sit at the end. There are no articles, no plurals and no grammatical gender, and the subject is left out whenever it is obvious.

Note that は and を are read wa and o when they are particles. Politeness lives in the verb: start with the です/ます forms, which are right with strangers, colleagues and shop staff. The plain forms (食べる, 行く) are for friends and family and appear at A2. Keigo, the respectful and humble forms of business and service, is B1 material. And あなた is not a neutral "you": Japanese uses the person's name with さん (san) or nothing at all.

The first 500 to 1,000 words

Aim for 300 to 500 words in the first two months and about 1,000 by month six, ten new ones a day, each inside a short sentence with audio; the first 1,000 words explains why. Katakana loanwords are free vocabulary, with one trap: some were made in Japan and mean something else. マンション (manshon) is a block of flats, コンセント (konsento) a power socket. Counters are the other surprise: 一本 (ippon) for long objects, 一枚 (ichimai) for flat ones, 一人 (hitori) for one person; learn the five or six common ones and let the rest come. The picture dictionary's everyday phrases give the same words in Japanese and nine other languages.

Anime and manga, used well

Most people come to Japanese through anime or manga, and that is a fine reason. Use them well: one series, an episode for the story, then a five-minute scene with Japanese subtitles, repeated aloud. Manga for younger readers often prints small readings (furigana) beside the kanji, which makes it real reading practice. The caution: anime speech is stylised. Characters say 俺 (ore) and お前 (omae), drop every polite ending and use endings no adult uses at work; copying that with a stranger sounds rude or comic. Learn what characters say, but speak like the textbook. More on method in learning a language with films and series.

A plan by weeks and months

At 45 to 60 minutes a day these are realistic targets, not promises. The US Foreign Service Institute puts Japanese among the hardest languages for English speakers, with about 88 weeks of full-time study to professional proficiency; how long does it take to learn a language puts such numbers in context.

The JLPT in brief

The JLPT has five levels, from N5, the easiest, to N1. It tests vocabulary, kanji, grammar, reading and listening, and has no speaking or writing part, so a pass says nothing about how well you talk. It is held in July and December in Japan and in many countries (some cities hold only one session a year), scored out of 180, and the certificate does not expire. N2 is the level many Japanese employers and universities ask for. How it compares with other exams is in language certificates.

What trips up English speakers

• Living in romaji. It hides long vowels and the small っ and keeps you away from real text.
• Kanji flashcards with no words. Characters learned alone are forgotten; learn them in words you already say.
• Reading romaji with English vowels. E is the e of "get", never "ee"; sake has two syllables.
• Saying 私は and あなた in every sentence. Leave out what is obvious, as Japanese does.
• Anime Japanese with real people. Polite forms first, casual speech when invited.
• Waiting to speak until the kanji are done. They never are. Speak from week two with what you have.

In LinguaPair

The Japanese course runs from A0 to C2, and A0 and A1 are free. A0 is hiragana with stroke order and audio; A1 adds katakana, greetings, です, places, numbers and time, the ます verbs and the first kanji, always with their readings. Explanations and word meanings come in English, and only the material is in Japanese. If you already know some Japanese, the free level test puts you on the right lesson. Words from lessons, reading and films go into one spaced-repetition trainer, each with an example and audio. And if your partner speaks Japanese, the live translator carries your conversations while you learn: what that looks like at the table is in meeting your partner's Japanese parents. If Korean is also on your list, see how to learn Korean on your own.