Learning
How long does it take to learn Japanese?
About 2,200 class hours, spread over 88 weeks of full-time study, for an English speaker to speak and understand Japanese at a professional level. That figure is from the US Foreign Service Institute (the FSI), which places Japanese in the hardest of its 4 groups.
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
The source
Where the Japanese estimate comes from.
The Japanese figure is published by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the part of the US State Department that trains diplomats before they are posted abroad. Its language training page lists how long its students usually need for each language, and it sorts 59 languages into categories by that time. We read the page again on , and the Japanese entry had not changed.
Japanese is in Category IV, with Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin and Korean, 5 languages in all. The FSI’s own label for this group is “super-hard languages,” which it describes as “exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.” The listed time is 88 weeks and 2,200 class hours.
Spanish690 class hours, 30 weeks
Japanese2,200 class hours, 88 weeks
Next to a language near English, the gap is large. Spanish is listed at 30 weeks, so Japanese asks for 58 more weeks of full-time class and about 3.2 times the class hours. The Spanish numbers are worked through in how long it takes to learn Spanish.
Class hours are not the whole of an FSI student’s week. The page says a typical week holds 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study, meaning work done alone outside the classroom. Over 88 weeks that self-study comes to 1,496 hours, which brings the real total to about 3,696.
Two details of the estimate are easy to miss, and both change how it should be read. The finish line is level 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, the scale US agencies use to rate language skill, and the FSI states it for speaking and listening. And the estimate describes adults who study as their full-time job, with trained teachers, which is a long way from evening study after work.
Why so long
What makes Japanese take longer for English speakers.
Japanese takes longer by the FSI’s account simply because it is far from English. The page gives that one reason for the whole category and no breakdown for Japanese itself, so the details below come from Japan’s own official bodies, not from the FSI.
The clearest difference is the writing. Written Japanese mixes 3 scripts. Two of them, hiragana and katakana, are sets of characters that each stand for a sound, and together they are called kana. The third is kanji, the characters that came from Chinese and stand for meanings. Even the first level of the JLPT, the main exam for learners of Japanese, expects all of them. Its organizers describe that level as reading typical sentences written in hiragana, katakana and basic kanji (the JLPT’s organizers).
The two sound-based scripts are small and usually fill the first weeks of a course. Kanji are the long road. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs keeps the government’s table of kanji for everyday use, which is meant as a guide for laws, official documents, newspapers, magazines and broadcasting. Since a revision in 2010, the table has held 2,136 characters, up from 1,945.
1,026
taught across the 6 grades of elementary school, starting with 80 in first grade
2,136
in the table for everyday use, which students can read in full by the end of high school
4,388
readings listed for those characters, about 2.1 each
Japanese children do not learn the kanji quickly either. The school curriculum spreads 1,026 kanji across the 6 years of elementary school, by the count of Japan’s education ministry. The remaining 1,110 are picked up through the school years that follow, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs says students can read the full table by the time they finish high school.
Each character is also more than one thing to learn. The same table lists 4,388 readings, 2,352 that came with the characters from Chinese and 2,036 native Japanese ones, so a kanji is pronounced differently depending on the word it sits in.
Simple division shows the scale for an adult learner. One new kanji every day reaches the full table in about 5.9 years. Three a day takes about 2.0 years, and five a day about 1.2. That sum only covers meeting each character once. Remembering them takes review on top, and that review is what the hours are for.
Part time
Japanese at 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and 2 hours a day.
Part-time Japanese stretches the FSI’s weeks into years, and the daily amount sets how many. Each card takes the 2,200 class hours and divides them by a daily habit kept on all seven days. The second line counts the FSI student’s self-study as well, for a total of 3,696 hours.
2 hours a day728 hours a year
3.0years
5.1 years with the self-study counted
1 hour a day364 hours a year
6.0years
10.2 years with the self-study counted
30 minutes a day182 hours a year
12.1years
20.3 years with the self-study counted
15 minutes a day91 hours a year
24.2years
40.6 years with the self-study counted
Nobody has published a way to convert FSI class hours into hours of an app, a textbook or a tutor, so these are rough distances, not promises. They are also distances to a professional level. Ordering a meal, reading a menu or following a slow conversation comes far earlier on the same road. For every other language on the FSI’s list, see how long it takes to learn a language.
Try it
Set your own Japanese pace.
Your own Japanese pace is rarely the same every day of the week, so this tool takes two inputs: the minutes you study on a study day, and how many such days a week you can keep. It returns the years, the year you would finish, and how much of the road one year covers.
At this pace
9.4years
to reach 2,200 hours, finishing around 2036 if you start this year.
- A week
- 4h 30m
- A year
- 234h
One square is one year
The myth
The JLPT levels, and the study hours nobody official published.
JLPT stands for the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test, the exam most learners use to mark their progress. It is run by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, and it has 5 levels. N5 is the first and N1 is the hardest (the organizers’ level summary).
The organizers describe each level by what you can do with the language. N5 is “the ability to understand some basic Japanese.” N1 is “the ability to understand Japanese used in a variety of circumstances,” which includes reading newspaper editorials and following speech at natural speed.
Search for any level and you will find a table that says how many study hours it takes. Those tables are passed from site to site as if the test’s organizers had published them, and they have not. We read the organizers’ level summary and their FAQ page on , and neither gives study hours for any level.
The organizers have in fact moved away from that sort of list. Their FAQ explains that since the test was revised in 2010, they no longer publish the specifications that listed the vocabulary, kanji and grammar for each level. The reason they give is that the goal of studying Japanese is to communicate, not to memorize items.
An hour count for N5 or N1 is therefore somebody’s estimate, usually a school’s. It may be a fair one, and it should be read as an estimate. The hours on this page that an official body did publish are the FSI’s alone, and they measure a different finish line from any JLPT level.
Worked example
A first month of Japanese, on the calendar.
A first month of Japanese has an obvious order, because you cannot read a textbook until you can read the scripts. This example starts on Sunday, , with a rest day, and gives each of the four weeks one job.
The schedule is 45 minutes on weekdays and a longer 75 minutes on Saturday, when there is room to practice speaking with a tutor or a language partner.
Week 1· to
Hiragana
Learn to read and write the first sound-based script, a row at a time.
Banked so far5h
Week 2· to
Katakana
The second sound-based script, plus greetings and set phrases out loud.
Banked so far10h
Week 3· to
First sentences
Basic sentence patterns from a beginner textbook or course, read in kana.
Banked so far15h
Week 4· to
First kanji
A handful of first-grade kanji inside words you already know, and a short talk on Saturday.
Banked so far20h
The month banks 20 hours, which is 0.9% of the FSI’s class hours. Kept up without a break, the same week adds up to 260 hours a year and reaches the class hours in 440 weeks, about 8.5 years, or 14.2 years with the self-study counted. Those are large numbers, and they are the honest ones. How well each hour is spent matters too, and how to study effectively covers what the research says about that.
The test
How you know it is working.
Progress in Japanese is hard to feel from the inside, because the road is long enough that one month looks much like the last. Two checks make it visible. The first is the hours: did this week reach the number you set? The second is a reading check. Once a month, open the same beginner text and see how far you get before you have to look something up.
The test
Your Japanese hours reach your weekly number, and the monthly reading check gets further than last time
Hours for 4 weeks in a row, then the reading check.
The hours are the half people get wrong, because a remembered week tends to look fuller than the real one. A good way to count them takes the time from what you already write or say about your day, with no stopwatch to start. Most journaling apps keep how the day felt and never add up how much of it went to Japanese, so there is no weekly figure to hold against your plan.
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your Japanese, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. Set a weekly target for study, and the insights show the weeks and months adding up.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
Example person
What a month of logged practice looks like.
Logged practice is easier to picture with a full month of entries in front of you. The example person below is an accountant learning a language around a full-time job. To be plain about it: this is a made-up person, not a real user, and the language is Spanish, not Japanese. The point is how the hours get counted, which works the same way for any language.
Each day was written the way people talk about their day, and the app turned the words into hours. The first week held 1h 10m of practice. By the third week it was 4h 30m.
Week two · Spanish
to- A day, on average
- 30m
- The week
- 3h 30m
Week three · Spanish
to- A day, on average
- 39m
- The week
- 4h 30m
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
All four weeks · What the log shows
to- Spanish in total
- 14h 5m
- A day, on average
- 30m
- Days with any
- 27of 28 days
- Longest unbroken stretch
- 1h, to
- Most in one day
- 1h 30m
- Least in one day
- 0m
What took the time that day
- Work10h
- Using Phone2h
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Four weeks, counted from the person's own words
Spanish a week
1h 10m4h 55m
3h 45m more in week four than in week one
Week one
1h 10m
A few minutes on a phone app, with one day skipped.
Week two
3h 30m
Lessons booked, and practice on the commute.
Week three
4h 30m
A weekly class makes Saturday the biggest day.
Week four
4h 55m
Nothing new added. The routine simply holds.
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Now put Japanese numbers on that routine. The fourth week came to 4h 55m. At that weekly pace, the FSI’s 2,200 class hours for Japanese would take about 447 weeks, close to 8.6 years. At the first week’s pace it would take about 36 years.
That difference is the whole argument for counting. The person did not study harder in week four. They found three places in an ordinary week where practice fits, and the count showed, week after week, that those places were holding.
Sources
Where the numbers come from.
Every figure on this page traces to one of these official pages. The two Japanese government sources are in Japanese, and we read the passages cited in the original.
- U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute (read ). Foreign Language Training.
- Interagency Language Roundtable (read ). Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level Descriptions: Speaking.
- Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (read ). Do you know the Joyo Kanji table? (in Japanese).
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan (read ). Commentary on the elementary school course of study (2017 notice), Japanese language (in Japanese).
- Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (Japan Foundation; Japan Educational Exchanges and Services) (read ). N1-N5: Summary of Linguistic Competence Required for Each Level.
- Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (Japan Foundation; Japan Educational Exchanges and Services) (read ). FAQ.
Japanese is a few thousand hours, and nobody finishes it by accident. Pick a weekly number you can keep, learn the kana this month, and count.
Keep reading.
- How long to learn a languageHours by language, and what they mean at your pace.
- How long to learn SpanishAbout 690 class hours, and what that is at your pace.
- Active recallRecalling instead of rereading: the evidence, and a schedule.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
Questions
Questions people ask.
Can you learn Japanese in a year?
You can get a long way into the basics, but not to the level the FSI measures. One hour a day for a year is 364 hours, against 2,200 class hours in its estimate. Even its full-time students are given 88 weeks, which is more than a year and a half.
Is Japanese harder to learn than Spanish?
For an English speaker, it takes far longer by the FSI's figures: 2,200 class hours for Japanese against 690 for Spanish, about 3.2 times as many. The FSI puts Japanese in its top category and Spanish in its first.
How many kanji do I need to learn?
Japan's official table of kanji for everyday use holds 2,136 characters, and Japanese students can read all of them by the end of high school. The first 1,026 are taught in elementary school. How many you need depends on what you want to read.
How many hours does it take to pass the JLPT N5 or N1?
The test's organizers do not publish study hours for any level. Their level pages describe what you can read and understand at each of the 5 levels, and the hour tables found online come from schools and learners, so treat them as estimates.
How long does it take to learn Japanese at 30 minutes a day?
Thirty minutes every day is 182 hours a year. At that pace the FSI's 2,200 class hours take about 12.1 years. Much of what people want from Japanese sits well short of that level, and the same pace reaches it sooner.
Do anime, dramas and games count as study hours?
Time spent listening to and reading real Japanese is time with the language, and it belongs in your count. The FSI's figure is for taught class hours, though, so keep the two apart in your log: hours of study, and hours of Japanese you simply enjoyed.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.