Beginner Japanese

Read and write all forty-six hiragana, plus the voiced and combined forms, and sound out real Japanese words for the first time.

Read and write the full katakana set, spot the pairs that look alike, and write foreign words and your own name in Japanese.

Pronounce Japanese with even beats, hold long vowels and double consonants for their full length, and hear the pitch that separates words that look alike.

Build polite sentences of the form A is B, join nouns with の, and introduce yourself and the things around you.

Choose between the two particles that land where English puts a subject, using rules of thumb that hold up in real sentences.

Say what you eat, read, drink and buy, using verbs in the ます form and the particle that marks the object.

Count from one to ten thousand, pick the right counter for what you are counting, and tell somebody the time and the date.

Turn any sentence into a question with one syllable, and use the full set of question words to ask who, what, where, when, why and how much.

Read your first two dozen kanji, and work out which of a character's several readings a word is using.

Turn any ます verb into its four polite forms, and do the same for です, so you can say what did not happen and what already did.

Describe things in all four tenses using both kinds of Japanese adjective, and stop mixing up the two sets of endings.

Build the て form of any verb in any of the three groups, and use it to string actions together in one sentence.

Ask someone to do something with てください, and say what is happening right now with ています.

Say where you are going, how you are getting there and what you are doing when you arrive, using に, へ and で.

Say that something exists and where it is, using あります for things and います for people and animals.

Say what you like, what you want, what you want to do and what you can do, and watch the particle が where English expects an object.