The Tour

Welcome to Blackbelt Japanese, a unique approach to practicing Japanese!

Blackbelt Japanese is very patient. Repeat the lessons, chats and drills as many times as you like. The more practice you do, the more you can improve your scores and your Japanese conversation skills.

Lessons include:

Vocab Drills - See and hear each word spoken by a native speaker.
Kanji Drills - Onyomi and kunyomi readings for each character.
Kanji Compound Drills - Practice reading kanji words.
Video Chats - Automated guided conversations.
Video Translates - Translate sentences with instant feedback.
Word Invaders Games - Translate words under pressure!

Lessons available:

Free lessons at Basic, Intermediate and Advanced levels.
New Zealand NCEA levels 1 to 3.
Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) levels N1 to N5 [COMING SOON]

Teacher and Student Logins

Teacher logins are FREE.

Set up classes of students, so students can see their position on the Lesson Scoreboard.

Teachers can monitor the progress of each student:

Custom Vocab Lists

Students can make their own custom vocab lists. Teachers can also make lists for the whole class.

Add vocab to a list from any lesson, or from any existing list.

Teachers and students can see the class rankings on the Vocab Scoreboard:

Lesson features:

Vocab Drill	Like video chatting or instant messaging with a real person.

Video Chat	Switch between Japanese script and Romaji.
	Hints explain the prompts, and show model replies. The focus is on communication, so your replies don't need to be 100% correct to continue!
Video Translate	Interpret from Japanese to English, one sentence at a time.
	Mouse over for hints!
Kanji Drill
Kanji Compounds Drill
Word Invaders Game	Rapid-fire vocab testing. Based on the 1980's Space Invaders game!
	Play game now!

How It Works

The Video Chat uses our unique Guided Conversation Technology (GCT). You can take a different path through the conversation each time.

GCT lets you say what you want, the way you want to. It understands variations, and it accepts replies that are reasonably accurate, just as a real person would.

A bit like artificial intelligence, it's smart enough to change the direction of the conversation based on the way you reply, just like a real conversation.

No matter where you are in a lesson, you can see hints for model answers by using the mouse-over help at any time.

No textbook, online friend, or Japanese language CDs can let you practice Japanese in this way!