Learn Japanese to N4 reading in eighteen months
Eighteen months at 45 minutes a day gets a determined English speaker to comfortable N4-level reading and halting conversation. Roughly 400 hours total. Japanese is the long road — the writing system alone is a year-one project. Plan accordingly.
18 months · ~400 hours · read NHK Easy, hold a 10-minute conversation
1.Hiragana and katakana — first
Before anything else, learn the two phonetic alphabets. Use Tofugu's free hiragana and katakana mnemonic guides, then drill the chart for ten days. By the end of two weeks both should be readable on sight. Skip romaji from this point forward — every minute spent reading Japanese in Latin letters is a minute that delays your real reading. This is the single highest-leverage fortnight in the entire path.
Free
Tofugu hiragana guide →2.WaniKani — kanji and vocabulary
A spaced-repetition system that teaches roughly 2,000 kanji and 6,000 words in radical-first order, with mnemonics that actually stick. The first three levels are free, then it's a subscription. Reach Level 30 in about a year if you do reviews every day; that's enough kanji to read most native graded content. The discipline is daily reviews, not new lessons — miss a week and the pile becomes punishing.
First 3 levels free; $9/month or $89/year for full access
WaniKani →3.Tae Kim's Guide + native input
Tae Kim's free grammar guide explains Japanese the way Japanese actually works — particles, verb forms, the role of は versus が — without forcing you through textbook dialogues you don't care about. Read one section every other day. Pair it with NHK News Web Easy (real news rewritten with furigana) once you're four months in, and a Netflix show with Japanese subs by month nine. Add an italki tutor at month twelve for $10–15/hour conversation reps.
Tae Kim free; NHK Easy free; italki ~$10–15/hour
Tae Kim's Guide →If this doesn't fit you
If you'd rather follow a paid, structured roadmap with a Discord community, TheMoeWay (learnjapanese.moe) is a free immersion-first guide widely used by anime-driven learners — heavy on Anki decks and native-content immersion from day one. It gets to fluency faster than this path but demands two-plus hours a day and a tolerance for early frustration. Strong choice if your motivation is unsubbed media.
Why this path
Japanese punishes shortcuts and rewards consistency. WaniKani solves the kanji problem better than any alternative because the SRS schedule is the discipline; you don't have to design a study plan. Tae Kim teaches grammar concepts in the order Japanese needs you to know them, not the order Genki publishes them. The mistake almost everyone makes is delaying real reading until they "feel ready" — start NHK Easy at month four, even if it takes you twenty minutes to read one paragraph.