Japanese for beginners
If you are starting from zero, you do not need an overview but an order. This page gives you one — six steps, each with its grammar topic, the matching words and a reason why it sits where it does.
Why an order and not a list
This site has 136 grammar topics. For someone just starting out, that is not an offer but a wall: everything looks equally important, and the obvious way in — starting at the top — leads into the tense system before a single sentence is in place.
So the order below is not a sorting of the material but a recommendation, and it follows one rule: every step must make one more sentence possible that you could not say before. Anything that does not — however correct it may be — comes later.
Three things first
- Twenty minutes on six days beats two hours on one. That is not a lecture but the reason this site has a daily goal: revision works through intervals, and you need more than one interval.
- You will not learn pronunciation here. This site explains and tests, both in writing. Speaking and listening are learnt with people or with recordings — the site is no substitute for that and does not try to be.
- Mistakes are the point of practice, not its failure. Whatever you get wrong comes back tomorrow; whatever sticks, only in five weeks. If you only practise what you already know, you do not move forward.
The first six steps
Hiragana first, and only hiragana. Every kanji on this site carries its reading in hiragana above it, so the forty-six signs are the key to every sentence here — learn them before anything else, and the rest of the site opens.
To go with it: Greetings and set phrases — 40 words.
The simplest Japanese sentence is a noun with です at the end: 学生です, “I am a student”. There is no word for “I” unless it is needed, and no “a”, and that is the first surprise worth having early.
To go with it: People and the family — 41 words.
Japanese marks what each noun is doing with a small word after it — は, が, を, に — and not with its place in the sentence. は and が come first because almost every sentence has one of them, and the difference between the two is the one learners keep coming back to.
To go with it: This, that and question words — 40 words.
The verb goes at the very end, and its polite form ends in ます. Present and future are one form: 食べます is “I eat” and “I will eat”, and the sentence around it says which.
To go with it: Food and drink — 40 words.
With a verb in place, を marks what the verb acts on: 水を飲みます. Together with は and ます that is a complete everyday sentence, and most of what follows adds to it rather than changing it.
To go with it: At home — 40 words.
The te-form joins actions, asks politely and builds half the grammar of the later levels — 見てください, 読んでいます. Its sound changes look like a list of exceptions and are in fact a handful of patterns; learning them now saves learning them again in every later topic.
To go with it: Places in town — 40 words.
And after that?
After these six steps you can manage simple sentences in the present and the past, questions and the first few hundred words. That is the point at which an order is no longer needed: from here, the way forward depends on what you need the language for.
All 35 topics of level N5 are on the N5 page; if you would rather practise straight away than read, start with the daily dose — it decides for itself what comes up today.