🇯🇵 The best courses for learning Japanese

Two long-form articles with a mnemonic and a practice sheet for every character, plus a spaced-out study schedule you can follow in a couple of days. This is the standard first step almost every serious Japanese learner is pointed at, and it costs nothing. Do these before touching any app — kana first is not optional, and romaji-based courses will slow you down later.

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.

Thousands of lessons built around a short native dialogue plus line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and cultural notes at the paid tiers. The sheer volume means you can always find something at your level. Caveats worth knowing: the pricing is aggressive with constant discount emails and multiple tiers, quality varies a lot between older and newer series, and the free account is heavily limited after a trial period.

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.

An archived but complete video course arguing that standard textbooks misrepresent Japanese by mapping it onto English, and rebuilding the grammar around an invisible が subject in every sentence. For a lot of learners this is the explanation that finally makes は versus が, passives and causatives click. Cure Dolly died in 2021, so nothing new is coming and the Patreon is gone; the channel and an Internet Archive mirror remain up. Be warned: the synthetic robot voice and avatar put many people off, and subtitles are essential.

If you are self-studying Genki or Tobira without a teacher, these lesson-by-lesson videos are the closest free substitute for a classroom explanation. Andy also covers study strategy and JLPT prep honestly, without hype. The YouTube content is free; a paid membership adds structured courses and practice material. It is tied to specific textbooks, so it is less useful if you are not using them.

The free YouTube channel is mostly comedy skits about Japanese life, but Dogen's paid phonetics series is the most systematic treatment of pitch accent and pronunciation available in English, and pitch accent is the thing almost every self-taught learner ignores until it is a hard habit to fix. The full course lives on Patreon (roughly $10/month) rather than YouTube. Only worth it once your grammar and vocabulary are solid enough that accent is your bottleneck.

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.

Aims to be WaniKani plus Bunpro plus graded reading in a single structured route from pre-N5 to N1, with human-written (explicitly not AI-generated) grammar lessons. $8.99/month, $83.88/year or $349.99 lifetime, with a 14-day trial and a free kana trainer, dictionary and grammar library. N2 content was still being completed as of 2026 and N1 has not started, so advanced learners will outrun it.

Hundreds of free lessons working through JLPT grammar points in Japanese only, which doubles as listening practice and is the standard recommendation for N2 and N1 preparation. Free on YouTube; the company also sells structured online courses. Because it is all in Japanese with no English scaffolding, it is unusable below roughly N4 level.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

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.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

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.

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.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

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.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.