Eleven short lessons, L0–L10, meant to be taken in order. Lesson 0 tunes your ear — no memorization — and Lessons 1–9 each add a few frames, the vocabulary to fill them, and one scene from real travel. Lesson 10 adds no new grammar at all: it’s the emergency safety net, built entirely from frames you already own. (The frames are numbered in the order you meet them — all twenty, plus the techniques and every word, are on the Map.)
Study with your ears, not your eyes: every Japanese sentence below is playable, and hidden until you play it — tap it, listen, repeat it aloud, then check yourself against the text and meaning that appear (tap again to listen as often as you like). After each lesson, download its Anki deck (linked at the bottom of every lesson) and let daily review carry what you’ve learned while you move forward — the first card below, How to Drill, is the five-minute read on making those reviews stick; take it before Lesson 0. And when you want to say something the lessons haven’t taught, the AI translator builds it from pieces you own.
Two honest cautions. Japan changes: prices, tax rules, transit passes, hours, and procedures in these pages were correct when written and will drift — the Japanese will keep working long after a fee or rule has moved on, so when a real-world detail matters to your plans, verify it against a current source. And this course was built with substantial help from AI: it has been reviewed with care, but a factual error may have crept in somewhere despite that. Trust the frames; double-check the facts.
Not a lesson — the five-minute read before Lesson 0. Make Anki carry the course: the deck habits, the say-it-aloud rule, the sustainable pace, and the two-minute personal deck that keeps every word you harvest.
No vocabulary, no grammar — just calibrating your ear and mouth. Five vowels, even beats, long vowels, doubled consonants, and the sounds English speakers get wrong.
22 chunks, zero grammar. Open any interaction, close it warmly, and rescue yourself from any sentence you didn’t catch.
3 new frames, 30 items. Name yourself, name anything you can point at, harvest new words on the spot — and triage any sign or form you can’t read.
1 new frame, the whole number system, and your first full scene: walk into a konbini, buy something warm, and don’t drop a single exchange.
3 new frames, ~28 items. Ask whether anything exists, ask where it is — and shape your questions so you can always catch the answer.
5 new frames and the restaurant scene end to end: get seated, order for two, survive ‘sold out,’ get the check, and leave like a regular.
The transit scene: verbs of motion, the clock, yesterday/today/tomorrow — and the technique that turns every frame you own into any question you need.
2 new frames, ~18 items. The six polite requests, the permission frame, the days of the week — and a reservation assembled entirely from pieces you already own.
1 new frame, ~22 items. The safety net: symptoms, allergies, a lost bag at the kouban — and the three little sentences that stop, fix, or wave off any problem.
2 new frames, ~19 items. The capstone: chaining sentences, five cheap tricks for hard grammar, the ne/yo polish — and the small-talk arc that turns strangers into dinner plans.
No new frames — the safety net for the worst day: call for help, say you’re hurt, find the embassy or a shelter, and recognize an earthquake or tsunami alert.