Whether you're coming for work, study, family, or a PCS — a Tokyo tower block or a northern farm town — the first weeks in Japan feel like living inside a book you can't read. The fix isn't "learn Japanese" — a four-thousand-hour project — it's learning the right two hundred things first. This is the order that works.
Hiragana and katakana are two 46-character alphabets, and katakana alone is a superpower for new arrivals: most menu items, store names, and imported words are katakana renderings of words you already know. コーヒー is just "coffee." A week of spaced practice makes both scripts stick; after that, romaji only slows you down.
You will hear ８８０円 said aloud at a register within hours of landing, and Japanese numbers have irregular readings that textbooks bury in chapter nine (300 is さんびゃく, not さんひゃく). Drill prices and clock times early — they're the highest-frequency listening practice in the country and they happen to you daily, free of charge. Add the counter phrases that run every transaction: これをください ("this one, please"), お願いします, 袋お願いします.
営業中 (open), 準備中 (closed — preparing), 定休日 (regular closing day), 入口 / 出口 (entrance/exit), 押 / 引 (push/pull — end the daily gaijin door mix-up). Sign kanji are the best first kanji because the world quizzes you on them constantly, and each one decomposes into parts you'll reuse: the 中 in 営業中 is the same "in progress" that appears in 使用中 (in use).
The particle patterns that run daily life — 〜をください, 〜はどこですか, 〜にいきます — are better learned by using them until the pattern becomes obvious. Once you've ordered three different things with をください, you don't need a lecture; you need someone to point out you've been using a pattern, and one test on a sentence you've never seen to prove it transfers.
If you have weeks before the flight, spend them in this order: kana first (above), then the pieces below — each one pays off within days of landing.
Phrase lists rank Japanese by translatability. Daily life ranks it by task. These are the tasks that actually arrive in your first months, in rough order:
The best study material is the paper Japan hands you: receipts, packaging, the notice in the elevator, the menu you photographed. Study what you saw today and the spacing takes care of itself, because tomorrow the world shows you the same words again. The app is built around this loop, but the loop works with a notebook too.
This is the summary; the printable 30-day checklist expands it into week-by-week tasks with self-checks you can put on paper.
Once you know enough town to run errands in it, Yokoso's Errand Runs build a daily session shaped like an actual day — konbini, station, work, izakaya — entirely from material you already know, so review happens inside context instead of a flashcard stack.
Yokoso is a free app that runs precisely this order — and if you arrive with prior Japanese, it detects and skips what you already know instead of making you re-earn it. No placement test, no ads, no streaks, honest JLPT tracking when you're ready for it, and WaniKani import if you've been studying kanji already. It works offline and syncs across devices.
Start learning free — no signupYokoso is an independent learning app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense or any military service.