Who keeps Kanaroad, and how a page gets written

What Kanaroad is for

Kanaroad exists for one reader: somebody teaching themselves Japanese without a classroom, trying to work out what to do first and what to spend money on. It is not a course, it sells nothing of its own, and it is not affiliated with any app, school or examining body named on it.

The site covers the self-study route only. Live classes, brand-against-brand app comparisons and the wider question of which language to learn are other people's ground, and we stay off it.

How a page gets written

Every page starts from the question somebody actually typed, and answers it in the first two sentences. Then it shows its working, because an answer without a source is an opinion wearing a suit.

The rules we work to:

• Exam facts come from the examining body's own page. For the JLPT that means jlpt.jp, run by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, and the date it was read appears beside the fact.
• Prices come from the seller's own page on a stated day. If a seller renders its prices only inside a checkout, we say so and print no number rather than repeat a directory's guess.
• The only study-time figure on the site is the US Foreign Service Institute's published language category, and it is always labelled as what it is: classroom hours for US government students in full-time training.
• No page promises fluency, a pass, a job or a timescale. Nobody can promise those and the ones who do are selling.
• Where a free tool is the right answer, it gets the recommendation and we say that it pays us nothing.

What we will not publish

We will not print a hours-per-JLPT-level table. The figures that circulate come from surveys of learners passed between third-party sites, the test's own organisers do not publish them, and a number with no source behind it reads as a fact to every reader who meets it.

We will not print a kanji or vocabulary count "required" for a level either, for the same reason: since the test was revised in 2010 the organisers have deliberately stopped publishing those lists, and everything sold as one is a reconstruction. We do not run coupon pages, we do not link past exam papers that are not the organisers' own, and we do not write about teaching Japanese — only about learning it.

Corrections

If a price on this site is stale, a quotation is wrong, or a link goes somewhere it should not, tell us and it gets fixed with the date of the correction left visible. Write to the desk through the contact page.

We also publish our refusals rather than quietly dropping them. The list of programmes this site will not join, and why, is on the page about how this site earns.