Japanese Language Courses

The JLPT ladder

• N5 and N4 — basic. N5 is commonly the minimum evidence of study for a Japanese language school application.
• N3 — intermediate. The point at which everyday life becomes manageable.
• N2 — what most Japanese employers and many universities treat as the working threshold.
• N1 — advanced, and required for professional and academic contexts.
• JLPT tests reading and listening only. There is no speaking or writing production component, which is why an N2 holder can still struggle to hold a conversation.

Three scripts, and no way around them

Hiragana and katakana are learnable in weeks. Kanji is the long project — a few hundred characters for N4, a couple of thousand for N1 — and it is the reason Japanese timelines are longer than European ones.

Courses that delay the script to keep early lessons comfortable do students real harm. We start it immediately, because everything after the first level depends on it.

Study routes to Japan

The common path is a Japanese language school, which issues a Certificate of Eligibility that you then convert to a visa at the embassy. Schools generally want evidence of prior study — roughly N5 — plus financial documentation from you or a sponsor.

Degree programmes taught in Japanese expect N2 or better. There are English-taught programmes at the larger universities, which shift the language from an admission requirement to a living requirement.

How our courses run

JLPT-aligned levels with kanji integrated from the first weeks, listening practice at natural speed rather than textbook pace, and speaking work added deliberately — because the exam does not test it and students who train only for the exam arrive unable to talk.