Read seven real words from eleven characters
A hiragana character is a whole syllable, not a letter. Learn eleven of them and read dog, cat, water, bird, forest, tree and fox, which all come back in the closing stories.
Japanese lessons
Learn to read Japanese.
We’ll start with eleven characters and the seven real words they spell, then the three sets of characters a page mixes.
After that, how a sentence holds together, and a story you can try before you check the English.
13 core chapters · 4 optional references · Free, at your own pace
Starting from scratch
Start with eleven characters and the words they spell, then the rest of the writing system and the sentence patterns a story runs on. The cards below let you try a greeting or meet the characters first.
Start with the characters →Try saying helloA first hello
Read seven words
A first hello
in Japanese.
Japanese greets by the clock rather than by the person, so start with the one that fits the time of day. The pronunciation and English are there to help.
Try the lesson A reading-first approachRead seven words
from eleven characters.
Each hiragana character is a whole syllable. Learn eleven of them and you can read dog, cat, water, bird, forest, tree and fox.
See how the characters workChapter 1 of 17 · Explore the Japanese path
Start here · Chapter 1 of 17
How these lessons work
See how the three lines fit together: the Japanese, the sound in Latin letters, and the English. You use the same three all the way through, and at checkpoints the last two stay hidden until you ask.
≈ 1 min of reading · Practise at your own pace
What’s in this chapter
- This path starts from no Japanese and ends with a short story whose pronunciation and English begin hidden.
- You decode seven real words in the very next section, before any full character table.
- Every piece of Japanese is printed three ways: the Japanese, the sound in Latin letters, and the English.
- This path teaches the plain forms books are written in, not the polite forms a beginner course starts with.
- Four sections are reference tables. Open them when something blocks you and skip them otherwise.
This is short preparation for reading a book, not a complete course: how the writing system works, where the pieces of a sentence sit, and enough recurring words to get through a first page with help. Good news first: Japanese pronunciation is regular — five vowel sounds, no tones, no stress to guess at. The work is the writing and the word order, and that is where this path spends its space.
dog
いぬ
inu
The large text is the Japanese, inu is the pronunciation guide, and the English is the meaning. At checkpoints, the last two stay hidden until you choose to reveal them.
How to use a checkpoint
Look at the Japanese first. Then reveal.
- いぬ
Two characters, and each one is a whole syllable. The first says “i”.
Show answer +Hide answer −
いぬinu “dog”. Say “i-nu”.
The chapters
What do you want to work on?
If you’re starting from scratch, follow the chapters in order. Otherwise, pick the bit you need. You can skip the reference pages and come back to them.
Your first spoken words, and how polite to be
Japanese greets by the clock rather than by the person, so there is no all-purpose hello. Learn six words people use straight away, and where the polite gear sits.
Where describing words sit, and the two kinds
An adjective is a describing word: big, small, sad, good. Japanese puts them in front of the noun and never changes them to match it, but they split into two kinds that attach differently.
Asking a question, and writing down what someone said
A question costs one character on the end and moves nothing else. Then learn the frame Japanese writes speech in, so you can find the edges of every line of dialogue on a page.
First reading with help: two animals on the road
Read a short scene one line at a time, with the pronunciation and the English visible underneath. Every word in it has been glossed already, so you can practise following who did what.
Come back to these chapters whenever you need them.All Japanese chapters ↗