A note before you dive in: this course is under active development. Lessons are still being revised and expanded, so pages, audio, and Anki decks may change without notice — in particular, decks you download today may not merge cleanly with later versions. Study freely; just treat everything as provisional until a first stable release.
A traveler’s survival kit — tiny, polite, spoken on purpose
MiniCore Japanese is a deliberately restricted slice of real Japanese for travelers: roughly 300 drilled items arranged around 20 fixed sentence frames, spoken-only, written in romaji (Latin letters — no Japanese script to learn), and locked to the polite register. It is not a path to fluency, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is a minimal set of real Japanese that natives understand instantly, selected to help you navigate the most common travel scenarios.
It’s built for someone with no prior exposure to Japanese — or to Japan: alongside the language, each lesson teaches the one or two behaviors every guidebook assumes you already know, from the cash tray to the toilet slippers. And if you studied Japanese once and it has lapsed, the same small core makes an efficient pre-trip refresher — for you it’s mostly review and sharpening, and it goes much faster than a first pass (the pacing notes on How to Drill cover both cases).
The kit also assumes a smartphone in your pocket, and uses it: translation apps are built in as the official bailout — the final rung of a repair ladder you start drilling in Lesson 1, not a guilty secret. So why not just rely on the app? Because most travel Japanese is a handful of three-second exchanges — a register, a doorway, a platform — that are over before an app is unlocked; and because an app speaks for you far more gracefully than it hears for you, while the replies keep arriving as spoken Japanese, at speed, in noisy rooms. The kit covers those predictable seconds with your own voice and ears. The app covers everything else — and knowing exactly when to reach for it is one of the things this course teaches.
The method
- Frames, not conjugation. The entire grammar is 20 sentence patterns with swappable slots —
___ wa doko desu ka(“where is ?”),___ o kudasai(", please"),___, ii desu ka(“is ___ okay?”). Vocabulary rotates through the slots; the frames themselves never change. No verb tables, no clause embedding. (All twenty are on the Map, with the techniques and every word.) - One open door: nouns. Verbs and adjectives are a small closed set, but any noun in the world drops into any slot. The course teaches you to harvest nouns in the field — point and ask Kore wa nihongo de nan desu ka (“what is this in Japanese?”) — so the system grows on its own.
- Collapse rules instead of hard grammar. Conditionals, comparisons, “must” and “can’t,” past-tense adjectives — each hard idea collapses to a cheap trick built from things you already own. “If it’s expensive I won’t buy it” becomes two tiny sentences, not a grammar chapter.
- Recognition without production. The fixed things Japan says to you — konbini (convenience-store) scripts, restaurant questions, station announcements — are drilled for listening only. You learn to catch the decision point and answer from your own small kit.
- Behavior notes where words aren’t the answer. Each lesson carries one or two cultural moves that no vocabulary can substitute for: the cash tray, the toilet slippers, the indirect no.
Audio first — this course is for your ears
Every Japanese sentence on this site is playable — and hidden until you play it. The study loop is always the same: tap it and listen, repeat it aloud, then check yourself against the text and meaning that appear — and tap again to listen once more. MiniCore is spoken-only by design — the text is the map, the audio is the territory. If you read a sentence before you’ve heard it, you’re studying a different (and less useful) course.
Own it with Anki
Reading the lessons rents the course; spaced repetition buys it. Every lesson ends with a downloadable Anki deck of that lesson’s sentences, vocabulary, and dialog lines — all with audio, and deduplicated across the course, so importing all eleven decks never drills the same text twice. Every deck — lessons, boosters, and the skills with something to say — also carries speaking cards: its checkpoint’s self-test as cards, an English scene on the front, your Japanese out loud before the flip — so everything the course teaches gets drilled in the speaking direction too, not just recognized. The intended rhythm: finish a lesson, import its deck, and let the daily review carry the material while you move on — a new lesson every few days is the pace that sticks (the arithmetic is on How to Drill).
Two habits make the decks work harder. Drill sentences, not words: the bare word cards ship suspended, so the sentences carry the vocabulary — unsuspend an individual word only if it keeps slipping inside its sentences. (Lesson 0’s deck is the one exception: pure pronunciation echo — drill it as-is, then retire it.) And recognition-only material is tagged recognition, so you can filter the listen-only script lines into their own drill. The rest of the technique — including the personal deck Lesson 2 has you start for words you harvest in the field — lives on How to Drill.
Where to start
Lesson 0 tunes your ear — vowels, rhythm, long sounds — with nothing to memorize. Then Lessons 1–9 build the system in order, each anchored to real scenes: the konbini, the restaurant, the train, the ryokan (a traditional inn), the police box, and finally dinner plans with a friend. Lesson 10 closes the eleven-lesson course with the emergency safety net — no new grammar, just the words for the worst day, drilled cold and hopefully never used.
And when you need a sentence the lessons never taught, the AI translator turns your favorite AI chatbot into a strict MiniCore translator — it answers “how do I say this?” using only the pieces you own.
Keep the Map open as you go: the whole course on one page — the twenty frames, the shortcuts that stretch them, the moves for when you’re stuck, and every word grouped by theme. It’s the fastest way to see where a new piece fits.
After the course
Three pages carry you past Lesson 10. Boosters holds optional themed boosters that drop new nouns into the frames you already own — no new grammar, ever. More than twenty are live, from onsen (hot-spring) etiquette, ryokan and capsule-hotel nights, cat and owl cafés, and shrine stamps to izakaya (Japanese-pub) and karaoke evenings, ticket-machine ramen, conveyor-belt sushi, the depachika food hall, the drugstore run, sumo and ballgame nights, typhoon days, mountain trails and campgrounds, festivals, the shinkansen (bullet train), and sending suitcases ahead and postcards home. Skills holds optional extensions to the system itself. The first three sharpen the core you already have: an ear for staff keigo (the ornate polite Japanese spoken at every counter), Chaining — stringing your pieces into longer sentences, the course’s single most important move — and The Mixer, which recombines every form and word you own into fresh sentences to drill by ear. The rest buy back a specific ability the core skips: reading katakana (the script menus and shop signs use for foreign loanwords) and the sign kanji that gate doors, bodies, and money, numbers and prices at native speed, the calendar, and clock time with minutes. And Beyond MiniCore names the handful of apps worth packing alongside the course, plus an honest map of where to go when the survival kit isn’t enough.