Japanese for beginners, with NoaLingua

Week one: hiragana, and nothing else

Hiragana is 46 basic characters, and it is the writing system used for native words and for every piece of grammar in the language. Nothing else can start until it is done, so the correct strategy is to drill it hard for a week and get out — not to spread it across a month while also dabbling in phrases.

The usual advice is to start with the five vowels あ い う え お, because every other character in the chart is built on one of those sounds, and then work through the chart row by row. Writing them by hand helps most people remember the shapes even if you never intend to write Japanese afterwards.

1. Learn the five vowels first: あ, い, う, え, お.
2. Work through the chart one row at a time — か行, さ行, and so on.
3. Write each character by hand a few times; stroke order helps the shape stick.
4. Drill with spaced repetition rather than by re-reading the chart.
5. Read simple kana-only text aloud by the end of the week, slowly and badly. That is the goal.

Week two: katakana, which feels harder and is not

Katakana is the same 46 sounds in a second set of shapes, used mostly for loanwords and foreign names. It usually feels harder than hiragana for two reasons: several characters look alike, and you meet it less often at first, so it decays faster.

The compensation is that katakana words are frequently English you already know, wearing a disguise. Working out that a word you cannot read is in fact "computer" or "restaurant" is the first moment in Japanese where the language gives something back, and it arrives in week two.

Weeks three to eight: sentences, not word lists

With both kana done, the useful unit becomes the sentence. Japanese word order puts the verb at the end and marks the role of each noun with a particle rather than with position, which is far enough from English that learning words in isolation leaves you unable to assemble them.

So learn patterns with words inside them. A handful of particles — は, が, を, に, で — does most of the structural work in ordinary sentences, and meeting them repeatedly in real material teaches them better than any table. This is also the point at which watching becomes useful rather than decorative.

Particles are the grammar

They mark who is doing what to whom. Getting は and が exactly right takes years and getting them approximately right takes weeks — and approximately right is enough to read.

Learn plain forms alongside polite ones

Textbooks start with です and ます; real speech uses plain forms constantly. Meeting both from the start prevents the common shock of finding that nobody talks like the textbook.

Do not chase every kanji

In month two, a sentence with one unreadable character is still a sentence you can learn from. Click it, take the reading, move on.