Japanese is spoken by around 125 million people, almost entirely in Japan. Every phrase in this course is shown in Japanese script with a plain phonetic guide directly underneath, so you can follow along by sound even before the characters feel familiar.
Audio quality depends on the text-to-speech voices installed on your device, but the phrase card and full word list below always display correctly either way. Every phrase is spoken aloud, shown with a phonetic guide, and listed in full underneath the player โ read along, listen with your eyes closed, or both.
Japanese is written with a mix of three writing systems โ hiragana, katakana, and kanji. If it looks unfamiliar, that's normal โ the phonetic guide under every phrase on this page (and in the word list below the player) exists specifically so you never have to guess.
Learners sometimes try to map Japanese word order directly onto English โ Japanese is subject-object-verb, so the verb comes last.
Japanese is spoken by around 125 million people, almost entirely in Japan.
Japanese is written with a mix of three writing systems โ hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Every phrase on this page is shown in that script alongside a plain-English phonetic guide, so you're never stuck if the characters feel unfamiliar.
Learners sometimes try to map Japanese word order directly onto English โ Japanese is subject-object-verb, so the verb comes last.