If anyone who knows zero Japanese asks me how they can get started, I always recommend the Minna no Nihongo series. I had studied two or three chapters of Genki with a tutor, but I didn’t connect with the structure of that textbook the same way that I did with Minna no Nihongo.

When I started this textbook in 2020, I had lived in Japan for about 6 months but was at almost zero Japanese — I just knew how to read hiragana and katakana and say short set phrases like おはようございます and ありがとうございます. I talked to my Japanese friends exclusively through their limited English and Google translate.
When the COVID-19 lockdown started, I decided to commit to studying properly and spent a few hours per day slowly working through this textbook. By the time I started meeting up with my friends again 2-3 months later (socially distanced, of course), they were shocked. We chatted in Japanese, and I didn’t need to whip out my phone AT ALL for the first couple minutes. I’m sure I was speaking slowly and using very simple vocabulary, but I was conversational!

This textbook is thoughtfully laid out with examples of the sentence patterns that you will learn at the beginning of each chapter, as a preview, followed by an example conversation, a vocabulary list, concise grammar explanations, and various practice exercises.

It’s a bit of a pain to have to purchase both the 本冊 as well as the “Translation and Grammar Notes” as separate ***ks; however, after the initial purchase, this does not pose too much of a problem.

Tracking Heatmap

Historical Activity Visualization