How this works

Nihongo Path is a free course in Japanese covering the ground from your first character to JLPT N4. It is 43 lessons, roughly 5 hours of reading, a review deck that schedules every word and kana for you, and a set of standalone articles on method.

Written in English, pronounced in Devanagari

The site is in English. Every Japanese sound also carries a Devanagari reading, because Devanagari describes Japanese phonetics far more accurately than English spelling can. Japanese dental consonants, geminate consonants and the flapped र all have exact Devanagari equivalents and no good English ones.

That means this course is written for someone comfortable reading English who also reads Hindi. If you do not read Devanagari, the lessons still work: treat those lines as decoration and use the kana instead.

Scope

Everything here is aimed at JLPT N5 and N4. That is a deliberate ceiling. The lessons stay at the level of what you need to use the language and stop short of the edge cases, exceptions and register subtleties that belong to N3 and above.

Both levels are complete. N5 covers the writing system, pronunciation, numbers and counters, core grammar, and the roughly one hundred N5 kanji. N4 adds the plain form and casual speech, conditionals, the passive and causative, giving and receiving, a first look at keigo, and the next two hundred kanji. The course page lists every lesson in order.

No account, and no tracking

There is nothing to sign up for. Your progress and your review schedule are stored in your browser’s local storage. That keeps them private, because they never reach a server, but it also makes them fragile. They will not follow you to another device, and clearing your browser data clears them.

You can see and reset what is stored on the progress page.

What this course does not do

• Recorded audio. The speaker buttons use your device’s own Japanese voice, which is clear but synthetic, and they only appear if your device has one. The kana chart explains how to add a voice. Pair this with a source of spoken Japanese.
• Speaking practice. Reading about grammar does not produce fluency; you need someone to talk to.

Corrections are welcome, particularly on the Devanagari readings, which involve judgement calls where no mapping is exact.