30 days of Japanese: a plan you can actually finish
Japanese is not a 30-day language and the honest reason is specific: two syllabaries you can finish in a fortnight sit in front of a writing system that takes years. What a first month can do is get both kana scripts to automatic, put about a hundred kanji in front of you, and give you enough polite-form grammar to survive a shop and introduce yourself. This plan is sequenced around that shape, and it says what day 31 still looks like.
Day 30, honestly
You should be able to
- Read hiragana and katakana without stopping to work them out.
- Recognise around 80–100 kanji in context, mostly numbers, days, places and basic verbs.
- Introduce yourself for 60–90 seconds in ます form.
- Buy something, order in a restaurant, and ask where the station is.
- Follow slow, learner-directed speech on a familiar topic.
You will not be able to
- Read a manga page unassisted. Even furigana-heavy material assumes vocabulary you have not met.
- Watch anime without subtitles — and anime speech is mostly plain form, which you have barely started.
- Use keigo. You will know it exists and that it is a separate mountain.
- Produce natural pitch accent. Do not optimise for it in month one; it is a real feature but not this month's bottleneck.
- Handle counters reliably. There are dozens and they are irregular.
The 30 days
The daily routine (30–45 minutes)
- 10 min — kana or kanji drilling. Short and daily beats long and weekly for scripts.
- 10 min — new grammar or vocabulary from your chosen source. One point per day.
- 10 min — say the day's sentences aloud from memory, three times each.
- 5–10 min — review your own past mistakes, spaced out over days rather than crammed.
Week 1 — Hiragana
Read every hiragana without hesitating, and stop using romaji entirely.
| Day | Topic | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hiragana あ–の | The first five rows. Write them by hand; the motor memory is doing real work here. |
| 2 | Hiragana は–ん | The rest of the base set. Now you have all 46. |
| 3 | Dakuten and combos | が/ざ/だ/ば/ぱ, and small ゃゅょ. Also small っ — the pause that changes meaning. |
| 4 | Long vowels | おう vs お, and why とる and とおる are different words. English speakers under-hear this. |
| 5 | Read only in kana | Delete romaji from your notes today. Read 30 short words aloud. |
| 6 | Greetings | おはよう / こんにちは / すみません / ありがとうございます as fixed phrases, in kana. |
| 7 | Review | Kana speed check: read 50 words in under two minutes. Record a 30-second self-intro. |
Week 2 — Katakana and first sentences
Finish the second script and build sentences in polite form.
| Day | Topic | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Katakana ア–ノ | Same sounds, new shapes. Loanwords make this immediately useful. |
| 9 | Katakana ハ–ン | Finish the set. Practise on menu and product names. |
| 10 | Katakana traps | シ/ツ and ソ/ン look alike and are not. Also the ー long-vowel bar. |
| 11 | です sentences | 私は〜です. Nouns first — verbs come tomorrow and are easier once this is stable. |
| 12 | Particles は, を, に | The three that carry most beginner sentences. Learn what each does, not a chart. |
| 13 | ます form verbs | たべます, いきます, します. Polite present. Learn this before plain form, whatever anime taught you. |
| 14 | Review | Order food out loud, twice. Second time with no notes. |
Week 3 — Kanji, time, and joining ideas
Start kanji as a habit, and talk about when things happened.
| Day | Topic | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | First 20 kanji | Numbers, 日月火水木金土, 人, 大, 小. Learn readings in words, never as isolated character lists. |
| 16 | Past tense | ました / ませんでした. Now you can narrate a day. |
| 17 | 20 more kanji | Days, months, times. These pay off immediately because they are everywhere. |
| 18 | Adjectives | い-adjectives vs な-adjectives. They conjugate differently and this catches everyone. |
| 19 | て form | The single most productive form in the language. Expect it to take more than a day. |
| 20 | 20 more kanji | Places and directions: 上下中外, 駅, 店, 国. |
| 21 | Review | Two minutes out loud about yesterday. Record. Compare with day 7. |
Week 4 — Real input and your own material
Move off textbook sentences and onto something you chose.
| Day | Topic | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | Politeness map | ます/です vs plain form vs keigo. Where each belongs. Recognition only for keigo. |
| 23 | Counters, the survivable ones | つ, 人, 本, 枚. Enough to shop. Ignore the rest for now. |
| 24 | Asking questions | なに, どこ, いつ, どうして, いくら in full sentences. |
| 25 | First real listening | A slow learner podcast or NHK Easy audio. Gist only. It will feel bad; that is the exercise. |
| 26 | Shadowing | 60 seconds of that audio, repeated after the speaker until you can keep pace. |
| 27 | Your own material | A song, a game menu, a class handout. Mine ten sentences from something you picked. |
| 28 | Write | Ten sentences about your week in ます form. Have them corrected. |
| 29 | Unscripted | 90 seconds, no notes. Record it. |
| 30 | Milestone check | Play day 7, day 21 and day 29 back to back. That is your progress report. |
Kana first, kanji as a habit, romaji never
Hiragana takes about a week and katakana about the same, and they are both finite — which makes them the only part of Japanese writing you can simply finish. Do them first and do them daily rather than in one long weekend; scripts respond to spacing better than to intensity.
Kanji is the opposite shape. There is no month in which you finish it, so the only sane month-one goal is to start the habit and to learn readings inside words rather than as isolated characters. 山 alone is a flashcard; 山 in 富士山 and 山道 is a piece of the language.
Romaji is the one genuinely harmful shortcut. It lets you say things in week one and then blocks every piece of real material and freezes a wrong pronunciation in place. Delete it on day 5.
Learn ます form before plain form, whatever anime taught you
Textbooks that start with plain form are usually written for linguists. For someone who wants to talk to people, ます form is both the safe default with strangers and the form you will hear in shops, stations and workplaces.
Anime and games run mostly on plain form and casual speech, which is why learners who start there end up sounding either rude or like a character. Learn the polite forms first, then add plain form in month two as recognition.
Keigo — the honorific register — is a separate mountain and does not belong in month one at all. Knowing it exists is enough.
Things English speakers systematically under-hear
Long vowels. おばさん and おばあさん are different people. English does not use vowel length contrastively, so your ear filters it out until you deliberately train it.
The small っ. It is a pause, it is a whole beat long, and it distinguishes words. Say もっと and もと out loud next to each other until they feel different.
Pitch accent. It is real and it does distinguish words, but it is not month one's bottleneck. Get it passively by shadowing rather than by studying accent notation now.
Where langNote fits, and where it does not
langNote has no Japanese course. It takes material you already have — the textbook page, the class recording, the handout — and generates dictation, shadowing with pronunciation scoring, vocabulary, grammar drills, role-play and a spaced-repetition schedule from it.
Which means it is useful from roughly week 2, once material is accumulating faster than you can review it. For kana drilling in week 1, a free dedicated kana app is better and cheaper than us.
Questions people actually ask
- Can you learn Japanese in 30 days?
- No. A first month gets you both kana scripts, roughly 80–100 kanji, and enough polite grammar to introduce yourself and shop. Conversational Japanese is a multi-year project.
- How long does hiragana take?
- About a week of daily practice to read without hesitating, and katakana about the same. Spacing works far better than one long session for scripts.
- Should I learn kanji in the first month?
- Start the habit, do not chase a number. Around 60–100 characters is realistic, and readings should be learned inside words rather than as isolated characters.
- Should I learn plain form or ます form first?
- ます form. It is the safe default with strangers and what you hear in shops and stations. Plain form is what anime runs on, which is why learners who start there sound casual with the wrong people.
- Do I need to study pitch accent?
- Not in month one. It is a real feature of the language, but it is not the bottleneck yet. Pick it up passively through shadowing.
Written by the langNote team. langNote is a paid app, so treat the day-30 limits as the part worth trusting. This is a study plan, not a course: the teaching comes from whatever material you choose.