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🇯🇵 Free course

Learn Japanese — Japanese for beginners (N5)

Read hiragana and katakana, introduce yourself, and build simple Japanese sentences with the core particles and verbs.

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What you will learn

  1. Hiragana, part 1: vowels and the k, s, t rows
    Twenty squiggles today and you can already read すし, さけ, たこ and ちかてつ — and the chart is laid out in almost the same order as the Devanagari varnamala you learnt in school.
  2. Hiragana, part 2: the other rows, dakuten and small tsu
    Twenty-six more shapes, two tiny marks and one small つ — and you can read every hiragana word in Japanese, from ねこ to がっこう.
  3. Katakana: the script for foreign words
    In Tokyo your name, your city and your lunch are all written in katakana — ラフル from ムンバイ eating カレー — so learning it means you can read yourself.
  4. Greetings and introducing yourself
    Every Japanese interview, first day and video call opens with the same 20-second self-introduction — learn its five lines once and you will use them for the rest of your career.
  5. The basic sentence: X wa Y desu
    わたし は がくせい です has the same word order as 'मैं छात्र हूँ' — Hindi speakers already think in Japanese sentence shape; they just need four new pieces.
  6. Numbers, counting and telling the time
    Japanese counts in units of 10,000 — so 1 lakh is じゅうまん, '10 man' — and an Indian who already thinks in lakhs and crores has a head start on prices, salaries and train times.
  7. Particles: wo, ni, de, e
    Japanese particles are postpositions — the same idea as को, में and से in Hindi — so once you know which job each one does, you can shuffle a Japanese sentence and it still means the same thing.
  8. Verbs: the masu form, present and past
    One Japanese verb form works for I, you, he, she and they, male or female — たべます covers खाता हूँ, खाती हो and खाते हैं — and four endings give you present, past and both negatives.

How the course works