Learn to read Japanese
A short, active path into reading Japanese: decode seven real words from eleven kana, learn why the verb comes last and how nine particles carry the grammar, meet the plain past stories are told in, and read a short fable before opening your first book.
Start here
1 sectionStart here: what this path does
- 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”.