🇯🇵 The best books for learning Japanese

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Dozens of illustrated PDF booklets sorted into levels, from near-zero Japanese up to comfortable intermediate reading, published free by the tadoku (extensive reading) organisation. Perfect for the phase where textbook dialogues are boring but native material is still impossible. The catalogue is small compared to the paid printed sets, and the stories are simple by design.

Explains the language on its own terms — the copula, the real function of は versus が, plain form before polite form — instead of forcing it into English grammar categories. Completely free online, and available as a cheap ebook or app. It is dense and dry, uses casual forms early (which surprises people used to textbooks), and the last update was years ago, but as a grammar reference it has aged well.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

Balanced coverage of grammar, kanji, reading, listening and production, with a workbook and audio, which is why most university courses use it. Buying both volumes plus workbooks runs to roughly $150, and it really wants a teacher or study partner for the pair-work exercises. If you are self-studying, pair it with the free ToKini Andy video walkthroughs, which are keyed chapter by chapter.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Chapters are organised around topics — geography, history, pop culture, technology — with substantial Japanese-language readings rather than the drill-a-grammar-point structure of beginner books. The official site hosts free audio, vocabulary lists and supplementary material. It is a genuine step up in difficulty and expects you to already know Genki-level grammar and around 300 kanji; many learners find the jump from Genki 2 uncomfortable.