Japanese for Kids: What to Teach at Each Age (with a First 50 Words)

Search “Japanese for kids” and you will be offered worksheets, printable PDFs, YouTube channels, apps and textbooks — hundreds of them, most of them free. Parents rarely have a resource problem. What they have is a sequencing problem: nobody tells them what to teach at what age, in what order, and which of those free resources is worth an evening. This is that answer, written by teachers, with a first-50-words list you can print from this page.

Start with the age, not the resource

The single most common mistake we see is a parent buying a textbook aimed at an adult beginner and working through it with a six-year-old. The child is not failing; the material is aimed at a different brain. What a child can do with Japanese changes sharply between five and eleven.

Age	What works	What to skip	Realistic dose
3–5	Songs, greetings, counting, animal and food words, physical games. Sound before symbol.	Writing, grammar explanations, romaji drills	5–10 minutes, most days, always playful
6–8	Hiragana through words they want to read, short spoken exchanges, picture books, simple questions and answers	Kanji beyond a handful, verb conjugation tables	10–15 minutes daily, plus one longer social session a week
9–12	Katakana, first kanji, writing short messages, real conversations with peers, opinions and reasons	Adult textbooks, JLPT grinding before they can hold a conversation	15–20 minutes daily, plus weekly speaking with other people

One principle sits under all three rows: sound comes before symbol, and use comes before rules. A child who can say fifteen sentences and read almost nothing is in a far better position than a child who can recite the hiragana chart and has never answered a question in Japanese.

A first fifty words, chosen to be used today

Most beginner word lists are organised for the convenience of the list — colours, then numbers, then animals. This one is organised by what a child can do with it in the next ten minutes. Print this page, put it on the fridge, and tick a word when your child has actually said it to a person.

1. Words that start and end an interaction (10)

Japanese	Reading	English
おはよう	ohayou	good morning (casual)
こんにちは	konnichiwa	hello
こんばんは	konbanwa	good evening
またね	mata ne	see you
ありがとう	arigatou	thank you
ごめんね	gomen ne	sorry (to a friend)
おねがいします	onegaishimasu	please (asking for something)
はい	hai	yes
ううん	uun	no (casual)
いただきます	itadakimasu	said before eating

2. Words that say how they feel (8)

Japanese	Reading	English
たのしい	tanoshii	fun
うれしい	ureshii	happy
おいしい	oishii	delicious
すごい	sugoi	amazing
つかれた	tsukareta	I’m tired
おなかすいた	onaka suita	I’m hungry
こわい	kowai	scary
だいすき	daisuki	I really like it

3. Words that get them something (8)

Japanese	Reading	English
みず	mizu	water
ごはん	gohan	rice, a meal
トイレ	toire	toilet
もういっかい	mou ikkai	one more time
ちょっとまって	chotto matte	wait a moment
てつだって	tetsudatte	help me
これ	kore	this one
どれ	dore	which one

4. The people and places in their day (12)

Japanese	Reading	English
おかあさん	okaasan	mum
おとうさん	otousan	dad
おばあちゃん	obaachan	grandma
おじいちゃん	ojiichan	grandpa
ともだち	tomodachi	friend
せんせい	sensei	teacher
がっこう	gakkou	school
いえ	ie	house, home
こうえん	kouen	park
ねこ	neko	cat
いぬ	inu	dog
ほん	hon	book

5. Twelve words that turn the other 38 into sentences

Japanese	Reading	English	Try it
すき	suki	like	ねこがすき — I like cats
ある / いる	aru / iru	there is (thing / living)	ねこがいる — there’s a cat
いく	iku	to go	こうえんにいく — I’m going to the park
たべる	taberu	to eat	ごはんをたべる
のむ	nomu	to drink	みずをのむ
みる	miru	to watch, to see	アニメをみる
する	suru	to do	なにをする？ — what shall we do?
なに	nani	what	これはなに？
どこ	doko	where	ねこはどこ？
だれ	dare	who	だれといく？
おおきい	ookii	big	おおきいいぬ
ちいさい	chiisai	small	ちいさいねこ

Do not teach them as a list. Teach five at a time, use them for a week in real situations at home — at dinner, at the door, at bedtime — and only then add five more. Ten weeks and your child owns fifty words they have actually used, which is worth more than five hundred they have seen.

Hiragana: the order nobody tells you

The standard chart runs あ い う え お, and children dutifully learn it top to bottom and cannot read a single word for three weeks. Teach the chart order for reference, but introduce characters through words your child wants to read: their own name, ねこ, すき, the title of the show they watch. A child who can read one real word after twenty minutes will come back tomorrow.

And a firm recommendation: get off romaji as early as you can. Romaji is a crutch that makes the first fortnight easier and the next two years harder, because it trains the eye to expect English letters and quietly wrecks pronunciation. Use it in a word list like the one above, where it is a pronunciation guide for parents. Do not use it as your child’s reading system.

What each free resource is actually good for

Resource	Genuinely good for	What it cannot do
Printable worksheets and PDFs	Handwriting, stroke order, quiet independent minutes	Nothing spoken. A worksheet never asks a follow-up question.
YouTube channels and songs	Ear training, rhythm, vocabulary that sticks because it is set to music	No feedback. Your child can mispronounce a word for a year and nobody corrects it.
Apps and games	Streaks, kana recognition, five minutes in a car	Recognition is not production. Tapping the right answer is not saying it.
Picture books	Reading with meaning, shared time with a parent	Hard to find at the right level outside Japan
Weekend Japanese school	Structure, classmates, real teachers	Costs a Saturday, often pitched at native-level children
Talking with other children	Everything the rows above cannot do	Requires other children who speak Japanese

The honest bit

You can assemble a very good Japanese programme for your child out of free material, and many families do. What no amount of free material provides is the thing that makes a child keep going: someone on the other side who is waiting for them to say something. Worksheets do not wait. Apps do not care. Children work for people.

That is the piece we exist to supply. At TOMODACHI JAPAN children learn in small groups with qualified Japanese teachers and with children who actually live in Japan — so the fifty words above get spent on friends, weekly, and the free resources at home suddenly start to compound. Request the school guide here.

Next steps, depending on where you are: what a first term of classes should look like, whether a tutor is the right format for your child, and raising a bilingual Japanese child abroad.

FAQ

What age should a child start Japanese?

Whenever you can make it enjoyable and repeatable. Three-year-olds absorb sound beautifully but need a parent to carry the whole session; eight-year-olds can do a real lesson and read. There is no window that closes — but there is a habit that gets harder to start once a child’s week fills up.

Is Japanese hard for children to learn?

The spoken language is unusually kind to beginners: few sounds, no tones, very regular verbs. The writing is the hard part, and it arrives later. Children who are told “Japanese is hard” before they have said anything tend to believe it; children who can already say ten things find the writing much easier to face.

How long should we practise each day?

Less than you think, more often than you think. Ten focused minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday, because language is a habit before it is knowledge. Consistency is the variable that predicts where a child is in two years.

I do not speak Japanese. Can I still help?

Yes, and in one specific way: be the audience. You do not need to teach or correct — you need to ask “what’s this one?”, be delighted, and keep the routine on the calendar. Parents who learn alongside their child, badly and cheerfully, get better outcomes than parents who supervise.