About

NihonGo! is a free, no-account-needed website for learning Japanese from your very first greeting. There are no email signups and no premium tier. The site may show a few ads to help cover its costs.

Who makes it

NihonGo! is made by a working Japanese-language teacher, in their spare time. Every lesson is shaped by what beginners actually find hard in class: the sounds that are easy to mix up, the polite and casual ways of saying the same thing, and the small words that change a whole sentence.

How the lessons are made

• All example sentences and conversations are original. Nothing is copied from textbooks.
• Each lesson builds on the ones before it, so the Japanese you read uses words and grammar you have already met.
• The Japanese on every page is checked by the teacher before it goes online, and corrected when learners point something out.
• Stroke-order diagrams come from an open source; see Sources & credits.

What is on the site

The course runs in a single path:

• 13 chapters and 131 short episodes, from introducing yourself and shopping to talking about your day, making plans, and saying “what if”. Chapter 0 (7 episodes) is optional: the sounds of Japanese, everyday greetings, and a first look at hiragana and katakana
• Hiragana and katakana lessons, a few characters at a time: meet them, practise, read real words, then check
• The Kanji Terakoya: first kanji five at a time, with stroke order, readings, sentences and a flower stamp for each lesson
• “Heard in Anime” columns on the Japanese words you keep hearing

Each course episode takes about 5–10 minutes (kana and kanji lessons are shorter): meet the words, hear them in a short conversation, change the pattern to say your own thing, then check your understanding and speak. Japanese is written in hiragana with spaces between words, so you can read it as soon as you know the kana — and you can start before you know them all.

The two friends you keep seeing, sometimes drawn as cats and sometimes as themselves, are Fuji and Yuki. They are the conversation partners in every lesson and the friendly faces around the site.

For teachers

You are welcome to use NihonGo! in your classes: show the lessons on a screen, and print the kana charts, writing practice sheets and lesson notes for your students: they are all on one page. Please do not sell the material or post copies of it elsewhere; link to the pages instead.

Found a mistake, or have a question? Please get in touch.

Ready to start? Begin the course →