Learn Japanese for Free: The Setup That Actually Adds Up

Free resources can cover grammar, vocabulary, reading, and your first spoken sentences. The hard part is picking one for each kind of practice, then running them on one schedule.

Speaking practice can start with one short sentence about your own day:

毎日、駅まで歩きます。まいにち、えきまであるきます。 (mainichi,ekimadearukimasu.)

I walk to the station every day.

This setup is for self-study, when you want every hour of practice to add up. Do not expect this setup to correct your speaking, because none of these tools can hear you.

Any study plan, free or paid, has to cover four kinds of practice. The first is grammar with explanations, so you know why a sentence is built the way it is.

The second is review that shows you words and kanji again before you forget them. The third is reading and listening to Japanese outside of drills.

The fourth is speaking: building your own sentences and saying them out loud. Each kind trains a different skill, so each one needs time in your week.

Most people who feel stuck are not lazy. They have done one or two kinds of practice a lot, and the other two barely at all.

Speaking is the kind that self-study skips most often, and people notice the gap last. The field note on why you can read Japanese but not speak it explains that gap.

You need one free resource for each kind of practice, not 10 apps saved and rarely opened. Each of the four below is free to use, and the one exception is marked.

For grammar explanations, use Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. Its site offers the material “all for free,” and the guide begins with the most basic ideas before moving to harder ones.

For new learners, the site itself suggests its Complete Guide to Japanese first. It presents the grammar guide as support for your other study.

The grammar guide is mostly explanation, with practice exercises in some early chapters. It does not schedule reviews, so this setup pairs it with the review tool below.

For review, use Anki, a flashcard program that uses spaced repetition: it shows hard cards more often and known cards less often. The computer version is free, and so is AnkiDroid for Android, which contributors develop.

The official iOS app, AnkiMobile, is a purchase, and the money helps fund Anki's development. The real cost of Anki is setup work, because you or a deck you download decide what goes in it.

For reading, use NHK's news site in plain Japanese, “NHK Yasashii Kotoba News,” which still carries the name “NEWS WEB EASY.” NHK writes it for foreign residents of Japan and for children, in Japanese kept as plain as possible.

The site first shows a notice for users abroad: the text can be read outside Japan, though some videos may not play. If you also want listening input, the field note on learning Japanese with anime covers how to use shows for it.

For speaking, use self-talk. Describe small moments of your day out loud, using only words you already know.

Self-talk costs nothing and needs no app, and it gives you the practice the other three tools leave out. The sentence at the top of this page is a good size to aim for.

If you would rather cover all four kinds with apps, including paid ones, the field note on the best apps to learn Japanese compares them.

Free resources rarely fail because they are bad. They fail when four tools run with no shared schedule, so each one needs its own habit and its own moment in the day.

A weekly schedule with one fixed order solves most of that. Do your reviews first, then the new grammar or reading, then say something out loud.

Saying a sentence right after you meet a pattern turns something you read into something you can produce.

In the schedule below, the sentences are your own, built from that day's grammar point. Retelling means saying the main idea of the news story out loud.

Added up, that comes to about 25 minutes on days without reading and about 35 minutes on reading days.

Free keeps adding up for grammar, vocabulary, and reading. It adds up unevenly for the rest, and knowing the four gaps early keeps them from ending your study.

The first gap: nobody corrects your speaking. A grammar guide states a rule, and it cannot tell you that the sentence you said broke it.

Self-talk builds the habit of producing Japanese. Without feedback, a small error can stay in your speech for a long time.

The second gap: the four tools do not know about each other. The grammar guide cannot see your Anki deck, and the deck cannot see what you read this morning.

Early on, that does not matter much. After a few months, it can feel like running four separate hobbies that share one subject.

The third gap: you manage the review pile yourself. If you add cards faster than you clear them, the daily reviews can grow into the hundreds.

The limit is a setting or a habit, and you are the one who has to choose it and keep it.

The fourth gap: none of these four tools checks your level. A guide can suggest where a beginner starts, but if you already know some Japanese, you judge your level alone.

That is a fair trade for a setup that costs nothing. The point is to accept the trade knowingly.

For grammar, vocabulary, and reading, you can learn Japanese for free if you stay consistent. Speaking comes last, because regular feedback is the hardest thing to get for free.

Add small spoken sentences from your first words, rather than waiting until you know enough. Speaking practice stays manageable when it starts early and stays small.

The order in which to start the four kinds is covered in the beginner roadmap. If kana are still new to you, the hiragana field note comes first.

If you outgrow the free setup later, that is a normal path, not a failure. You will likely notice it when the same two limits keep returning: nobody corrects your spoken Japanese, and separate tools take daily effort to run.

None of the tools above is Ukiyoe Japanese, and it is not part of this free setup. It is a separate app, and we make it.

It keeps grammar explanations, kanji and vocabulary review, reading, and speaking practice in one app, so you are not running four separate tools.

In Speak, you talk with an AI partner that uses only the words and grammar you have studied, which gives your spoken sentences a listener. Reviews stop at a daily limit, and a missed item returns later the same day.

Not sure where to start? The placement takes three to five minutes and suggests a level, and you still pick the starting point yourself. You can change that choice later.