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You can get into an English-taught degree in Japan without knowing any Japanese. But you will live, shop, work part-time and probably look for jobs in Japanese. If you start in Class 11 or 12 here in India, your first year in Japan gets much easier.
Do you need Japanese if your degree is taught in English?
Not to get in. The University of Tokyo's PEAK programme teaches its courses in English. Its main entry route, the Admissions Office exam, is generally meant for students who went to school in a language other than Japanese, and it selects them through document screening and an interview. Even so, the same page says PEAK's English-medium Japan in East Asia course "puts importance on the acquisition of a certain level of Japanese proficiency." Programmes taught in Japanese are different: the university says a high level of Japanese is required on enrolment for its traditional undergraduate programmes.
You will not be the only one learning. Japan had 408,069 international students on 1 May 2025, according to the JASSO International Student Survey 2025. Of those, 140,174 were enrolled in Japanese language institutes.
Where does Japanese help outside the classroom?
Daily life. The Japan Foundation designed its coursebook, Irodori, to teach the basic Japanese needed for daily life and working in Japan. You can download it online as a PDF, with audio.
Part-time work. You need permission from the immigration authorities before you work. With it, you can work up to 28 hours a week, according to the University of Tokyo's guidance for international students.
Jobs after graduation. At a Ritsumeikan University career seminar, a senior career counsellor said business-level Japanese is required. Recruitment advice sites, application forms, competency tests and interviews all demand high levels of Japanese, and business manners, including polite language (keigo), "cannot be acquired overnight."
An article on Study Kyoto, a site for international students in Kyoto, says job hunting for new graduates normally starts about a year and a half before graduation. It advises first-year students to start learning the languages they will need. In a four-year degree, that leaves you about two and a half years in Japan before job hunting begins.
What do the JLPT levels mean?
The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has five levels: N5 is the easiest and N1 the hardest, according to the official JLPT level summary. N4 and N5 measure basic Japanese, mostly learned in class. N1 and N2 measure Japanese used across a broad range of everyday situations.
At N5, you can read typical expressions written in hiragana, katakana and basic kanji, and pick up information from short, slow conversations about daily life and the classroom. At N2, you can read clearly written newspaper articles and follow news reports spoken at nearly natural speed.
The JLPT does not directly test speaking or writing, as the JLPT's own guide points out. So practise speaking separately, even if you pass a level.
You can take the JLPT in India. The JLPT overseas test-site list shows eight cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Santiniketan and Karur. All hold the July test, and all except Santiniketan also hold the December test. Each city has its own host organisation, which handles registration.
How do you start learning Japanese from India?
The Japan Foundation, New Delhi lists:
JF Koza classes
the Minato online course
JF Chat Room for conversation practice
Irodori
the JLPT and the JFT-Basic test
If your school offers Japanese as a subject, read our guide on whether to take a foreign language at school.
How you study vocabulary matters too. In a 2008 study, Karpicke and Roediger had students learn foreign-language vocabulary. Once students had learned a word, repeatedly testing themselves on it had a large positive effect on recall later, while repeatedly re-studying it had none. The students' predictions of how well they would do did not match how they actually did. So use flashcards you test yourself on, and spread the reviews over days. Our guide to revising language vocabulary regularly shows how to set that up.
A 12-month starter plan alongside Class 12
Months 1-2: Learn hiragana, then katakana, for 20 minutes a day. Write each character from memory, not by copying.
Months 3-6: Work through Irodori Starter (A1), one topic a week. Read each dialogue aloud, and add about ten new words a day to your self-test cards.
Months 7-9: Move to Irodori Elementary 1 (A2). Add one speaking session a week, through JF Chat Room or a class.
Months 10-12: Register with your city's host organisation and sit N5 at the next July or December session. Then pick N4 as your target for before you leave.
Adding a language will take time from physics and maths. If a gap opens up, the Fermi Concept Library has a lesson for every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing, so you can fix the gap without restarting a whole chapter.
Still choosing where to study? Start with how to choose a country for undergraduate study abroad.
