Where can I learn Japanese online and easily?
Japanese, Nihongo, is an East Asian language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan, where it is the national and official language, making it one of the most spoken foreign languages in the world. Japanese is also the official language Palau. A member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, its relation to other languages, such as Korean, is debated for ages. Japonic languages have been grouped with other language families such as Ainu, Austroasiatic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance. While most people outside Japan refer to the language as ‘Japanese,’ native speakers call it ‘Nihongo.’ Same is the case with the name ‘Japan,’ which is referred to as ‘Nihon’ or ‘Nippon’ in the native dialect. Despite Japanese being a non-tonal language, it still follows a certain rhythm and cadence to its words and sentences. Japanese, one of the most fast-spoken languages in the world, with an average of eight syllables spoken per second, beats out Spanish, French and Italian!
Little is known of the language’s prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), the Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language and the first appearance of European loanwords. Despite popular belief, Japanese Chinese have a common kanji writing system and Japanese “borrows” quite a few phrases and words from Chinese. Japanese is considered one of the most unique languages in the world. The Japanese language relies on not one but three different alphabets – hiragana, katakana and kanji – which are differentiated both by their distinct appearances and by their use.
It is often said that globalization opens international markets, which is one of the reasons why learning Japanese is important. Japan is the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China. The Japanese economy is larger than those of Germany and the United Kingdom, which are ranked fourth and fifth-largest. The Japanese language is the ninth most spoken language in the world, with 128 million people speaking it as their first language in only two countries. Globally, Japanese is spoken by 128.3 million speakers. It might be more difficult to find a Japantown than a Chinatown, but the Japanese diaspora can be found in several countries. Brazil has the largest Japanese community, followed by the United States, the Philippines, China, the United Kingdom, Peru and Canada. Japanese communities are also found in Europe, South America, Central America, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Pacific Islands, Qatar, Pakistan and Russia.
Let's now look at how you can learn Japanese online, easily!
Online Courses to learn Japanese
Duolingo is a popular language learning site and app, that offers you to choose a convenient time to study besides how long you want to study each day. It is a really great way to study consistently and build up your Japanese day after day! Duolingo has lots of short, game-like activities. It is quite addictive and very different from the textbook way of studying.
Duolingo is completely free to use because they make money from advertising. So you will never be charged.
You can sync the online version and a mobile app version and study on the go!
JapanesePod101 is one of the most famous Japanese online courses. It’s been around for years and has literally thousands of audio and video lessons, accompanied by printable lesson notes, interactive quizzes, flashcard decks and more. Lessons run all the way from absolute beginner to advanced, and they have special courses for JLPT preparation too. You can acquire a free lifetime membership that gives you access to all the newest lessons. There are 3 to 5 new lessons published every week, and free members get access to all the new lessons for three weeks.
You can also get extras such as word of the day emails and special one-off vocab lessons for free
NHK World Easy Japanese Easy Japanese is a free online, audio and text-based course of 48 lessons for beginners, offering essential Japanese words, phrases and grammar, made by the Japanese national broadcaster, NHK. The course is designed for people living in Japan, available in 17 different languages, covering a lot of everyday living situations such as going to class, going shopping, even what to do in an earthquake! So if English isn’t your first language, and you’d like to learn Japanese in your own language, take a look.
Japan Foundation’s Marugoto course The Japan Foundation is an organization that promotes the Japanese language and culture around the world. They offer courses such as Marugoto, Kansai Dialect and Introduction to Haiku and many more in different languages, including Spanish, Indonesian and Thai.
Of them all, Marugoto is easy to use, fun and interactive course with a lot of pictures and lots of listening practice. Learners could choose from the two options: Marugoto ‘katsudoo’ a course that focuses on listening and speaking for everyday situations, while ‘katsudoo & rikai’ covers the same listening and speaking lessons, with added benefits of learning to read and write in Japanese and you will study more grammar. To take the course, you have to register (for free) on the Japan Foundation Minato e-learning portal.
Learn Japanese Free.com teaches Japanese for free. It currently has a course of 28 basic text lessons for complete beginners, plus a lot of special lessons, such as vocabulary on different themes.
Grammar resources for a determined Japanese learner
Tae Kim’s Japanese Grammar Guide is a comprehensive and completely free guide to Japanese grammar. Available online, or as a free pdf or app.
JGram is an excellent resource if you’re preparing for the JLPT! This site covers all the grammar points for every level of the JLPT. The page for each grammar point provides an explanation, plus loads of sample sentences. The sample sentences are user-submitted, so there’s always a big variety.
Imabi is a free site about Japanese grammar with very thorough explanations and lots of examples.
More resources to write
Free printable hiragana and katakana workbook is offered via free registration by JapanesePod101, and has lots of space for practising your handwriting on grid squares.
Free kanji book for beginners is another great resource offered for free by JapanesePod101. It works on teaching ‘radicals’ – the building blocks of kanji. By teaching essential radicals first, this book introduces over 1500 kanji.
Jisho is a free Japanese online dictionary. In addition to the standard dictionary function, there are some cool features such as sentence search. You can also view lists of words and kanji by JLPT level!
Practise resources
iTalki is a site where you can find language exchange partners to practise Japanese conversation for free.
At Lang8, you can practise your Japanese writing skills for free online by posting daily diary entries in Japanese. Your writing will be corrected by a native speaker.
Anki is an excellent flashcard app for practising kanji and vocabulary. You can create your own flashcard decks, or download one of the hundreds of pre-made decks shared by other students.
Memrise is another great flashcard app with preloaded Japanese decks.
The Japanese language Stack Exchange is a good place to get your grammar questions answered, for intermediate or higher level. You can search to see if anyone’s asked your question before, or just check in and browse to learn random new stuff.
MLC Japanese is actually a real-life Japanese school in Tokyo. They share tons of resources on their website for free. Not everything though, they offer some printable worksheets and lots of example sentences for different grammar points, so it can be a good extra resource to check when you’re looking for more help.
There are literally thousands of educational Japanese videos on YouTube at every level, all free. A really good one is JapanesePod101 (all levels, and separate from their online course), Japanese Ammo (beginner-intermediate) and Nihongo no Mori (intermediate-advanced, good for JLPT).
Finally,
These resources are amazingly helpful for new language learners. Apart of these all can be reduced to just one: PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!! Whatever learning style you have, whatever your native language is, the key to acquire and master a foreign language is to PRACTICE it as much and as often as possible.
Now YOU have some of the best tools to learn a new language. Go on now and give it a shot.