Yes! Human Japanese assumes you are starting at zero and anticipates the exact challenges English speakers might face when learning a language that’s so different from the one they know. Instead of only focusing on memorizing vocabulary, you can expect an immersive experience that starts by explaining the foundations of the Japanese language, offers cultural context, and builds from there. Each lesson will grow your skillset and confidence in a way that turns learning into an enjoyable journey.

As you go, you’ll have everything you need to review your skills and test your comprehension before moving to the next lesson.     

Absolutely! Many people find Human Japanese to be a useful refresher for what they learned in high school or college. Between Human Japanese (which starts at zero) and Human Japanese Intermediate, there are more than 80 chapters, so even if you find you already understand everything from the earliest chapters, by the time you get into Intermediate, you should find there are lots of new discoveries for you.

And the included "Extra Credit" content (at our partner site, Satori Reader) provides thousands of additional example sentences, with audio to practice what you learn—using exclusively grammar and vocabulary introduced in Human Japanese.

Human Japanese is our introductory course, which starts from square one, assuming absolutely zero previous knowledge. You’ll learn the basics—pronunciation, hiragana, katakana, greetings, how to build sentences, how to use adjectives and adverbs, and more.

Human Japanese Intermediate picks up where the intro course leaves off, exploring more advanced topics. You’ll learn how to use embedded questions ("I don’t remember where I put my keys"), verb nominalization ("I know that you ate my ice cream"), relative clauses ("the woman who is reading the newspaper"), and much more. Don’t be put off by the scary-sounding grammatical terms. We’ll walk through it all together with lots of examples and down-to-earth explanations.

These two volumes were previously sold as separate apps, but now, one subscription to Human Japanese Universal allows you to access both volumes from any device for one low price.

Human Japanese is a step-by-step, narrative introduction into Japanese. It is presented as a course where each lesson builds on the last and every example sentence uses only vocabulary and grammar that has previously been introduced. It aims to be the friendliest, most understandable introduction possible to Japanese.

Satori Reader is all about putting the Japanese you’re learning to use. It provides reading and listening material in the form of stories that include audio recordings. The text is presented with kanji, but you can adjust the use of the kanji to fit your individual knowledge and preferences (including zero kanji). Unlike Human Japanese, Satori Reader is not meant to be used in any particular order. Instead, users can explore freely, reading stories that interest them (though we do group stories roughly by difficulty to help in selecting a good fit).

Within Satori Reader, there are two series that exercise the vocabulary and grammar introduced in Human Japanese. Those series are Human Japanese: Extra Credit and Human Japanese Intermediate: Extra Credit, and they contain thousands of additional practice sentences tightly linked to what we introduce in each chapter of Human Japanese. The "Extra Credit" lessons are a great way to drill yourself on what you learned here and to ease into reading Japanese. Every subscription to Human Japanese Universal includes access to our "Extra Credit" content on Satori Reader.

Yes! Our Human Japanese Universal subscription allows you to access Human Japanese on any device through your browser, and we’ve designed it to work seamlessly on any size screen. So you can study on your laptop at home, and then seamlessly continue on your phone when you’re outside the house.

We are phasing out support for the legacy, standalone app store editions of Human Japanese and Human Japanese Intermediate. Going forward, Human Japanese Universal will be our flagship product, offering everything we offered via the legacy apps, and much, much more—such as "Extra Credit" access to thousands of additional practice sentences and support for your questions from real human beings at the end of each chapter.

First, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for supporting Human Japanese. Thanks to your support, we’ve been able to continue creating Japanese resources all these years.

We’re still in the process of figuring out how to support upgrade scenarios from the legacy apps. We are doing our best to provide a smooth upgrade process, but we’re a very small team and there are some practical limits to what we can offer. We hope to have a more fleshed-out plan soon.

In the meantime, we hope you’ll consider subscribing to Human Japanese Universal. We continue to work hard to provide the smoothest possible learning experience, and we would sincerely appreciate your continuing support!

The short answer is no. But please read on.

First, let us say that we completely understand. We originally offered Human Japanese and Human Japanese Intermediate as one-time purchases through the app stores. It was a source of deep pride to know that we were offering a comprehensive educational experience at such a good value for our customers. We never wanted price to stop people from experiencing the joy of learning Japanese.

Unfortunately, this led to an unintended consequence. Human Japanese has a niche audience, and even though the people who used our app loved it, our sales were very modest. However, software requires continuous maintenance. And as we expanded the line to support different platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android), we eventually had twenty different versions of the app to support and maintain.

Eventually we ended up with a pool of (very dearly appreciated!) customers who had purchased the app one time many years ago. They continued to email us for support, and the apps continued to need regular updates, but there was no new revenue from those users. We were crushed by the weight of the support and maintenance, and the apps unfortunately became neglected. The model simply became unsustainable.

Human Japanese Universal is our attempt to comprehensively rectify this problem. The subscription model allows us to continue to support and develop the product going forward. We’ve done our best to offer the service at the very best possible price, and to provide ongoing value to the learner.

We hope you’ll consider studying with us. We would be grateful for your support as a subscriber!