The best Japanese comprehensible input resources for absolute beginners and beginners No prior experience necessary!
In 2024, I started learning Japanese purely through consuming comprehensible input, no textbooks or classes, knowing nothing.
(To learn more about my views on and experience with comprehensible input as a language learning tool, check out this post!)
I know firsthand how confusing it is, and how hard it can be to find content you can just sit down and start watching immediately.
I would describe content at this level as absolute beginner-friendly, or N5.
N5? What’s that?
I’ll be throwing around the N5-N1 levels of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) along with “absolute beginner”, “beginner”, etc. because both forms of terminology pop up in learner’s materials. Many learner’s materials are graded by the JLPT levels, so it’s useful to have an idea of what level of comprehension you’re at.
Just remember, lower JLPT level number = higher difficulty. (Why did they do this?)
What’s the difference between absolute beginner and beginner content?
When you have ~50h of absolute beginner content under your belt, visual support (pictures, videos, drawings, etc.) becomes less crucial, and you can now recognize words and concepts like:
- Numbers
- Simple questions (e.g. Where is x? Do you like y? Have you done z?)
- Simple feelings and adjectives (e.g. pretty, scary, worried)
- Simple verbs (e.g. walking, talking, reading)
- Weather
- Time
- Clothing items
- Some foods, animals, and other nouns (e.g. book, table, car)
Congrats, you’re on your way from being an absolute beginner to being a beginner! Woohoo!
But don’t get too excited – you’re still N5.
Now you need to keep building on this baseline knowledge to get to the point of being able to understand audio-only learner’s content. This opens up a whole new world of free content – hello, podcasts! – and gives you the freedom to multitask while you get your listening practice in. This also starts to take you from N5 into N5/N4 level content. It took me about 115 hours of listening to comprehensible input until I started to understand beginner (N5/N4) podcasts. Don’t give up, it’s worth it!!
The following are the best comprehensible input resources for absolute beginners (N5) and beginners (N5/N4) that I’ve found, based on ease of understanding, enjoyment, and quantity of content.
They aren’t the only resources I used, but I believe they were the most essential to my advancement.
Starting from absolute beginner and getting more challenging:
Comprehensible Japanese
- Details:
- Website and YouTube channel
- Absolute beginner to advanced
- Multiple teachers
- Free and paid tiers
- How long I listened/watched: 72h
- Pros: I quickly went through the videos available for free and then subscribed to the paid tier. I do think it was worth the money – just don’t dawdle. I had the subscription for 5 months and paid $5/month (plus tax) for a total of $27.05. (The price has since risen to $8/month as of August 2025.) The absolute beginner and beginner videos are a great starting point for exposure to Japanese audio without the support of subtitles in your native language. There is also a satisfyingly large amount of content available with the paid subscription.
- Cons: The difficulty gap from beginner to intermediate videos is too large to make a smooth transition between them, and the original main teacher (Yuki) generally does a better job than the other, newer teachers of presenting topics in an understandable way for noobs. To mitigate this, I recommend sorting the videos from oldest to newest to get more understandable videos first. I moved on once I’d gone through all the complete beginner and beginner videos on the website and some of the intermediate videos. The lack of visual support, i.e. drawing or photos, in the intermediate (and more difficult beginner) videos stymied me. More complex vocabulary with drawings is easier to understand than easier vocabulary with just a person talking to the camera.
Japanese Immersion with Asami
- Details:
- YouTube channel
- Absolute beginner to beginner
- One teacher in one-on-one TPRS conversation with various students
- Free
- How long I listened/watched: 29h
- Pros: I freaking loved this channel and I wish they had more content available. Going through each story in excruciating detail and repetition really helped build my comprehension from the ground up, and Asami and her students are funny and charismatic, which helped the videos stay engaging. TPRS can feel a little cringe at first, but you get over that really fast and it starts to feel fun.
- Cons: The students’ half of the conversation is in nonnative accented Japanese, so the CI is less high-quality than if it had been a conversation between two native speakers. I also wish the organization of the videos was clearer, but what I did (and what I recommend) is watching the absolute beginner videos first, and then the story walkthroughs, oldest-to-newest.
Japanese with Shun
- Details:
- Podcast
- N5/N4
- Mostly one teacher, occasional guests
- Free
- How long I listened/watched: 21h
- Pros: I listened to almost all the episodes, and there are a lot of them! They’re short enough (at about ten minutes each) to not be overwhelming or strain your concentration, but substantial enough to track your progress. I recommend listening to the episodes oldest-to-newest because there is a gentle increase in difficulty over time. It fills a big gap between the absolute beginner stuff and the glut of N3 podcasters.
- Cons: At the end of each episode he does an English translation of key words used in the episode, but I just skipped those parts (comprehensible input purist here!). Additionally, some of the episodes specifically map onto chapters from the Genki textbooks and contain relevant vocabulary and grammar, but since I was able to listen to all of the episodes in the order they came out without breaking a sweat, I wish there had been a slightly more dramatic difference in difficulty. They get a little repetitive over time. However, watch out for collabs/interviews with other Japanese teachers in later episodes – they’re pretty challenging!
Let’s Talk in Japanese!
- Details:
- Podcast
- N5-N1 (I listened straight through N5-N3, N2 was too difficult at the time)
- One teacher
- Free
- How long I listened/watched: 33h
- Pros: Relaxing and entertaining, and a ton of episodes! Great for binging. This teacher is really gifted in modifying his speech to different levels of vocabulary and grammar, and the levels of difficulty are well-organized so you don’t get content that’s too frustrating to keep up with. That is, until you reach the level that’s too far above your current comprehension and have to move on. For me that was the N2 episodes.
- Cons: I couldn’t make the jump from the N3 to N2 podcast episodes, and I wish there were even more episodes!
Bonus: Daily Japanese with Naoko
- Details:
- YouTube channel
- N5/N4
- Mostly one teacher, occasional guests
- Free
- How long I listened/watched: 5h
- Pros: I’m including this channel as a bonus because there wasn’t enough content available at the time to make much of a difference in my learning journey, but I could see it helping a lot of people as it grows over time. Naoko offers varying levels of difficulty in her videos, but most of them have ample visual cues, and her way of speaking struck me as especially understandable for learners! Plus, the videos are just super cute and entertaining.
- Cons: Not enough content. Also, a mashup of terminology in the video titles and thumbnails (some videos are marked easy or intermediate, others are marked N5-N3) makes it difficult to tell the order in which they should be watched.
