Open Lingo
LearnGet started
I speak: English

Study guide · English speakers learning Japanese

How to learn Japanese: a step-by-step plan for English speakers

Kana first, then polite sentences and particles, then kanji learned through words, then as much reading and listening as you can find. What to drill at each stage, what to leave to input, and how long it honestly takes.

12 min readUpdated 30 Oct 2026Level: beginner to intermediate

On this page · The plan
  1. The plan
  2. 1. Kana
  3. 2. Polite sentences
  4. 3. Kanji and words
  5. 4. Graded reading
  6. 5. Native media
  7. Easy and hard for English speakers
  8. Your study stack
  9. References

Japanese is a long project for an English speaker. The US Foreign Service Institute puts it in its hardest group, estimating about 2,200 class hours for its students to reach professional working proficiency (FSI). That figure is for full-time classroom study toward a high bar; you can read simple stories and hold everyday conversations long before it. But it explains why a plan matters more here than in Spanish or French: some parts reward drilling hard and early, and most of the rest only arrives through months of input.

The planIf you study about 45 minutes a day
  1. 1
    Read and write hiragana and katakana

    46 hiragana, then 46 katakana, plus the marks that change them (゛ ゜, small っ, ゃゅょ).

    Weeks 1–3 · all drill

  2. 2
    Polite sentences, particles and the core words

    です and ます, the particles は が を に で, numbers, greetings.

    Weeks 3–8 · mostly drill

  3. 3
    Kanji through vocabulary, and the plain form

    Learn kanji inside the words you need, the て-form and plain forms, daily reviews.

    Months 2–6 · half and half

  4. 4
    Graded stories and slow listening

    Short graded stories, learner podcasts, sentences you mine for your deck.

    Months 4–12 · mostly input

  5. 5
    Real shows, books and the news

    Shows with Japanese subtitles, easy news, manga, then novels. Drill only what you mine.

    Year 1 on · mostly input

Times are rough ranges for a beginner studying most days, not a schedule. Less time a day stretches them; that's fine.

  1. KanaWeeks 1–3
  2. Polite sentencesWeeks 3–8
  3. Kanji and wordsMonths 2–6
  4. Graded readingMonths 4–12
  5. Native mediaYear 1 on
Red is drill, grey is input. Roughly how your study time splits between drill and input at each stage. Illustration: Open Lingo.

The single most useful thing to get right first: learn the kana properly and stop reading romaji. With short daily sessions, reading both kana slowly takes weeks, not months, and every resource after that assumes you can.

The split this guide uses: deliberate practice speeds up the parts of a language that are regular and countable (letters, endings, high-frequency words). Studies of classroom teaching find that explicit instruction in forms and rules produces large gains that last (Norris & Ortega (2000)). The feel for nuance, register and natural phrasing comes mostly from large amounts of meaningful listening and reading. So each stage below says what to drill and what to leave to input. Early on most of your Japanese time is drill; by the end most of it is input.

Read and write hiragana and katakana

Weeks 1–3 · all drill

Hiragana writes grammar and native words; katakana writes loanwords and emphasis. Learn hiragana first and use it for everything until katakana is in, then learn katakana while reading loanwords you already know (コーヒー kōhī, coffee). Write each character by hand a few times, even if you'll mostly type later: in a study of adult learners of Chinese, handwriting characters helped people recognise them better than typing them did (Guan et al. (2011)).

Drill this

Small, regular, testable. Flashcards and short exercises work.

  • The 46 basic hiragana. Chart, stroke order, then reading real words rather than isolated letters.
  • Voicing marks and small kana. か → が, は → ぱ; きゃ kya; small っ doubles the next consonant.
  • Long vowels. おばさん (aunt) vs おばあさん (grandmother): length changes the word.
  • Katakana, including look-alikes. シ/ツ and ソ/ン trip everyone up.

Pick this up from input

Fuzzy and contextual. Learn the basic rule, then notice it in use.

  • Pitch accent. Just listen to native audio with every word you learn; don't try to master it yet.
  • Rhythm. Japanese counts beats (morae), not syllables. You hear it before you can explain it.

On this site for this stage

Polite sentences, particles and the core words

Weeks 3–8 · mostly drill

Start with the polite ます form: it is what you'd use with strangers, and its conjugations are very regular. Particles carry the grammar. They come after the word they mark, and the verb comes last, so わたしはパンを食べます is literally "I (topic) bread (object) eat". Start a spaced-repetition habit now, with a few new words a day.

Drill this

Small, regular, testable. Flashcards and short exercises work.

  • ます forms. Present, past, negative, past negative: 食べます、食べました、食べません、食べませんでした.
  • Particle jobs. を object, に destination and time, で place of action and means.
  • ある vs いる. Things vs living beings. One rule, used constantly.
  • Numbers. Including the irregular readings: 4 is よん/し, 7 is なな/しち, 300 is さんびゃく.

Pick this up from input

Fuzzy and contextual. Learn the basic rule, then notice it in use.

  • は vs が. Learn the basic rule, then let thousands of examples do the rest. Even advanced learners keep refining it.
  • Sentence endings. ね and よ change the feel of a sentence more than its meaning.
  • Leaving things out. Japanese drops the subject when it's obvious. You get used to it by reading, not by rules.

On this site for this stage

Kanji through vocabulary, and the plain form

Months 2–6 · half and half

The standard list of kanji for everyday use, the jōyō list, has 2,136 characters (Agency for Cultural Affairs (2010)), and most have more than one reading. Learning them one by one with English keywords is a popular route; learning them inside vocabulary you actually meet is the other. Either works if you keep reviewing. Don't wait until you "know kanji" to start reading: reading is where most of them get reviewed.

Grammar here is the て-form (requests, "and then", "-ing") and the plain form, which is what you hear among friends and see in most writing.

Drill this

Small, regular, testable. Flashcards and short exercises work.

  • Kanji in words. Learn 電車 densha (train) as a word, not 電 and 車 as abstractions.
  • The て-form. Its sound changes (書いて、飲んで、行って) are a closed set: drill them until automatic.
  • Plain forms. 食べる、食べた、食べない: the dictionary forms behind everything you'll read.
  • Daily reviews. Ten to twenty new words a day, reviews every day. Consistency beats volume.

Pick this up from input

Fuzzy and contextual. Learn the basic rule, then notice it in use.

  • Which reading a kanji takes. Most words follow patterns you'll feel before you can state them.
  • Counters. Learn つ, 人, 枚 and 本 explicitly; the dozens of others come from reading.
  • Casual speech. Contractions like てる for ている are everywhere in speech.

On this site for this stage

Graded stories and slow listening

Months 4–12 · mostly input

Read lots of easy material written for learners, where you know almost every word. A meta-analysis of extensive-reading studies found that this kind of reading improves reading proficiency (Nakanishi (2015)). Pick things you can follow without a dictionary on every line. Add a podcast for learners on your commute and listen to things more than once.

Drill this

Small, regular, testable. Flashcards and short exercises work.

  • Words that keep coming back. If you've looked it up twice, it goes in your deck with the sentence it came from.
  • Grammar you keep tripping on. Look it up, make two or three cards, move on.

Pick this up from input

Fuzzy and contextual. Learn the basic rule, then notice it in use.

  • Reading speed. Only volume fixes this.
  • Polite and humble forms. Keigo patterns become recognisable long before you can produce them.
  • Natural phrasing. Which verb goes with which noun, what people actually say.

On this site for this stage

Real shows, books and the news

Year 1 on · mostly input

Switch to things made for Japanese people as soon as you can follow the gist with Japanese subtitles. Slice-of-life shows and dramas are easier than fantasy or period pieces. News written in simplified Japanese for learners and children is a good bridge to real news. Expect this stage to last years; it's also where the language gets fun.

Drill this

Small, regular, testable. Flashcards and short exercises work.

  • Sentence mining. One new word per card, in its original line. A few a day, not a hundred.

Pick this up from input

Fuzzy and contextual. Learn the basic rule, then notice it in use.

  • Speed, register and slang. Who talks how to whom.
  • Pitch accent, finally. Shadowing short clips helps once you can follow them.
  • The long tail of kanji. Rare characters come from reading, a few at a time.

What English speakers find easy and hard in Japanese

For an English speaker, being understood in Japanese comes quickly. Reading is the long part.

Easier than you'd think

  • Pronunciation. Five vowels, few consonants, and mostly consonant-vowel syllables. Being understood comes quickly.
  • No articles, gender or plurals. No a/the, no masculine/feminine, and nouns don't change for number.
  • Verbs don't change for person. 食べます is "I eat", "you eat" and "they eat".
  • Loanwords. Thousands of words come from English. Once you can read katakana, テーブル is just "table".

Harder than it looks

  • Kanji. Over two thousand characters for everyday reading, most with several readings. The biggest single time cost.
  • Word order and particles. The verb comes last, and particles do the work English does with word order.
  • Politeness levels. The same request has plain, polite and honorific forms, and choosing wrong is noticeable.
  • Long vowels and double consonants. きて (come), きって (stamp), きいて (listen): English ears merge them.
  • Few shared roots. Apart from loanwords, almost no vocabulary is related to English, so every word is new.

Your study stack

You don't need many tools. Three cover the whole plan, and each has a job it is bad at. Spaced review, whichever app does it, rests on one of the best-supported findings in memory research: reviews spread out over time are remembered far longer than the same reviews crammed together (Cepeda et al. (2006)).

Open Lingo

Stages 1–3 · free

Use it for: A structured Japanese course from kana up, with listening and reviews that adapt to what you forget.

Don't expect: The all-in-one app with your own shows and books built in. We're working on it; see the roadmap.

Anki

Stages 3–5 · free on desktop

Use it for: Your own cards: kanji in words, and sentences from what you read and watch. Very good at keeping a large deck alive.

Don't expect: Teaching. It only reviews what you put in, and the queue grows quickly if you skip days or add too many cards at once.

Language Reactor

Stages 4–5 · browser extension

Use it for: Japanese shows on Netflix and YouTube with two subtitle tracks, click-to-look-up and saving lines for later.

Don't expect: Accurate translations or a course. The second subtitle track is machine-made and often loose, and it is easy to end up reading English instead of listening.

Try an Open Lingo lesson with no sign-up. The Japanese course starts from zero.

Sources

  1. US Department of State, Foreign Language Training: language categories and class-hour estimates.
  2. Norris, J. M. & Ortega, L. (2000). Effectiveness of L2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning, 50(3), 417–528.
  3. Guan, C. Q., Liu, Y., Chan, D. H. L., Ye, F. & Perfetti, C. A. (2011). Writing strengthens orthography and alphabetic-coding strengthens phonology in learning to read Chinese. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3), 509–522.
  4. Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan. Jōyō kanji hyō (list of kanji for everyday use), cabinet notice of 30 November 2010.
  5. Nakanishi, T. (2015). A meta-analysis of extensive reading research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(1), 6–37.
  6. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.

Related

Study stack

  • Anki

    Kanji in words and mined sentences, from stage 3.

  • Language Reactor

    Japanese subtitles on YouTube and Netflix, from stage 4.

  • Open Lingo

    Kana and a structured course for stages 1–3.

We're building this

One app for the whole plan: lessons, reviews, and the Japanese stories and shows you read and watch, in one place. We're working on it.

In progress · Roadmap →