Start here, before anything else. Hiragana is the base of Japanese pronunciation — every sound in the language lives in this grid, and every word you will ever learn is built out of it. Learn to read it first and everything after it has something to stand on.

Katakana comes straight after hiragana. The same sounds and the same grid in different shapes — this is the script Japanese uses for words it borrowed, and it turns up more often every year. Menus, signs, tech, brand names. It pairs one for one with hiragana, which makes it quick to pick up.

Getting the whole picture early matters more here than anywhere else. With the kana readable, learn how Japanese actually sounds and how it is put together. On the sound side that means rhythm, pitch and vowel length — every beat takes the same time, pitch changes meaning, and one extra beat turns おばさん (obasan, aunt) into おばあさん (obaasan, grandmother).

On the structure side it means the rules English never gave you: the verb goes at the end, the subject gets dropped whenever it is obvious, and politeness is a layer running through the whole language. You are not studying keigo (敬語) yet — you are learning that it exists and what it signals. Meeting all of this now is far cheaper than unlearning it in a year.

Words come before grammar, but only a handful of them. Learn 50 to 100 words — the bare minimum, just enough that a sentence has something to be about — and then start the grammar on top of them.

From there, keep adding words alongside the grammar until you reach 1,000 to 1,500. At 1,500 you cover roughly 80% of everyday conversation, which is the point of the whole exercise. And you do not stop there: you keep learning words for as long as you study Japanese, they simply take up less and less of your time.

Start grammar the moment you have those first 50 to 100 words, and run it beside the vocabulary rather than after it. What you need at this stage is the core and nothing more: nouns, な-adjectives, い-adjectives, る-verbs, する/くる-verbs and U-verbs — how each of them conjugates.

That is the machinery the entire language runs on. Learn it in an order where each piece sits on the one before it, and the rest of Japanese stops looking like a list of exceptions.

Once you have basic words and some grammar — around five hundred words is enough — listening becomes the main work. Simple Japanese audio that you follow 70 to 80% of is all you need, and from there the only thing that matters is quantity: listen to as much Japanese as you possibly can.

Two things decide whether a piece of audio is worth your hours.

This is the step where most learners stall, and it is not because they did the earlier ones badly. It is because everything built so far is declarative knowledge — knowledge you can state. You know the word. You can explain the rule. Asked at your own pace, you are right.

A conversation does not run at your pace. At real speed the word you definitely know refuses to arrive, and the grammar you could explain on paper goes missing. What speaking needs is procedural knowledge — knowledge you can run without attending to it. In your own language you are not checking words or grammar as you go; it simply comes out. The shift between the two has a name in second-language acquisition: proceduralization, and it happens through one thing only — producing language under time pressure.

That is what impromptu speaking is for. Take whatever you are thinking right now and put it into Japanese, out loud, immediately. A few minutes a day is enough. It feels worse than studying did, because you are running the knowledge instead of collecting it. That discomfort is the drill working.

Having someone who points out the mistakes makes this dramatically faster; on your own you repeat your own errors until they set. A native friend works, and so does an AI. A Japanese teacher who understands how the language is built works better — they can tell you why the sentence was wrong, which is the part that carries over to the next one.