Japanese learning blog
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
All articles · Page 41
JLPT December 2026 Study Plan: 7 Weeks With 10 Minutes of Speaking a Day
The JLPT is on Sunday 6 December 2026, exactly seven weeks from today. This plan gives each week one job, builds in two timed mock tests, and keeps ten minutes of speaking every day, because grammar you can say is grammar you recognise instantly on the page. The JLPT itself has no speaking section, so the speaking is for you, not for the examiner.
11 min readLearn Japanese in 2027: A Realistic Twelve-Month Plan From Zero to Conversation
If you start Japanese in January 2027 and study most days, by December you can realistically hold a simple ten-minute conversation: introduce yourself, order, ask directions, talk about your week and your plans, and ask people to repeat or slow down. That is not fluency, and nobody honest will promise fluency in a year. It is the point where Japanese becomes usable, and this plan gets you there in four quarters.
11 min readNew Year's Resolution to Learn Japanese: How to Make It Stick Past February
Most New Year's resolutions to learn Japanese fade within a few weeks, not because people lack willpower but because the plan was too big to survive an ordinary Tuesday. The fix is to make the daily unit tiny, spoken and fixed to a time, and to measure days done rather than chapters finished. This guide shows how, with the Japanese you need to talk about your goal.
10 min readHow Much Does It Cost to Learn Japanese? Schools, Tutors, Classes, Apps and Free
Learning Japanese can cost almost nothing or the price of a year abroad. A full-time language school in Japan commonly runs to the high hundreds of thousands of yen a year in tuition alone, a private tutor online often costs somewhere between ten and forty dollars an hour, an evening group class is commonly a few hundred dollars a term, and a serious self-study setup with textbooks and one app subscription can stay well under the cost of a single month of lessons. The right question is not what is cheapest but what each option buys, and where your speaking practice will come from.
11 min readHow to Test Your Japanese Speaking Level: Can-Do Scales and a Self-Test
Your Japanese speaking level is what you can do with the language out loud, not which textbook you finished. You can test it today: record yourself answering four prompts of rising difficulty, then score the recordings against the can-do descriptions of the CEFR and the JF Standard. This guide gives you the scales, explains how a professional oral interview works, and provides the prompts in Japanese.
11 min readChatGPT Voice Mode for Japanese Speaking Practice: Setup, Prompts and Limits
ChatGPT's voice mode is a patient, always-available conversation partner that will talk about anything in Japanese, which makes it genuinely useful for speaking practice. To get value from it, you have to set it up: tell it in Japanese to stay in Japanese, to correct you, to slow down and not to over-praise, and accept that a general assistant does not score your pronunciation. This guide gives you the exact instructions and a routine.
11 min readLearn Japanese for Your Japan Trip 2027: A 20-Week Cherry Blossom Prep Plan
A trip to Japan in late March or April 2027 is about twenty weeks away from this October weekend, which is enough time to go from zero to travelling comfortably in Japanese: ordering, buying, asking the way, checking in, and joining a hanami picnic without translation. This plan splits the twenty weeks into five four-week blocks and adds the phrases cherry blossom season specifically demands, because it is the most crowded and most booked-up time of the year.
11 min readJapanese for Exchange Students: Your First Month on a Japanese Campus
Your first month as an exchange student in Japan is paperwork, a dorm, a flood of club invitations and the question of how to make Japanese friends who do not switch to English the moment you hesitate. This guide gives you the Japanese for each of those, in the order you will meet them, plus the one strategy that works for friendships: ask, in Japanese, to be spoken to in Japanese, and make it easy for people to say yes.
11 min readBusiness Japanese for Startup Founders: Pitching and Investor Meetings
A founder in Japan does not need perfect Japanese to raise money or sign a partner, but a first meeting conducted at least partly in Japanese changes how seriously you are taken, especially outside the English-speaking corners of Tokyo's startup scene. This guide covers the Japanese of that first meeting: introductions and business cards, a pitch in four lines, the questions investors and partners actually ask, how to answer when you do not know, and the follow-up the next day.
11 min readJapanese for Permanent Residency and Naturalization: Interviews and Paperwork
Permanent residency in Japan is a document-based application to the immigration authorities and does not come with a formal Japanese language test; naturalization is handled by the Legal Affairs Bureau, involves interviews, and expects everyday Japanese roughly at the level of a primary-school child. This guide gives you the vocabulary, the conversation both processes expect, and a calm way to prepare. The legal details change and depend on your situation, so treat them as pointers and confirm everything with official sources.
12 min readJapanese for Buying a Home in Japan: Viewing, Loan and Contract Day
Buying a home in Japan runs through a fixed sequence: viewings (内見), a loan pre-check, a legally required disclosure session called 重要事項説明, a contract with a deposit, and the handover of the keys. Each step has its own vocabulary, and most of it is spoken, not written. This guide gives you the phrases for every step in polite Japanese, plus the lines for the first knock on the neighbours' door.
12 min readJapanese for Daycare (Hoikuen) Parents: Handover, Renrakuchō and Sick Days
Hoikuen (保育園) is Japanese daycare, and most of the Japanese you need is spoken twice a day: a short handover at drop-off and a report at pick-up, plus a notebook called the renrakuchō (連絡帳) that travels in the bag. This guide gives you those routines line by line, the phrases for the application, the phone call when your child has a fever, and the vocabulary of events.
11 min readPractical guides
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