How this site earns, and the programmes it turns down

Who can pay us

Five companies named on this site run partner programmes we may join: Pimsleur, Rocket Languages, Rosetta Stone, italki and Preply. A link to one of them goes through an address beginning /go/, is marked sponsored nofollow so search engines do not treat it as a recommendation, and sits inside a box that says it is a paid placement.

Nothing else on this site pays us anything. That includes every free tool we recommend — a kana chart, Anki, NHK WORLD-JAPAN's free lessons, Duolingo's free tier — and every source we cite, including jlpt.jp and the US State Department.

Duolingo pays us nothing, and we recommend it anyway

Duolingo runs no public affiliate programme. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the app a beginner is most likely to be told to start with, and a site that earns nothing from it has an obvious incentive to steer you elsewhere.

We do not. Where a free tier is the honest first step, it gets the recommendation, and the pages say it pays us nothing. The same applies to Anki, whose desktop software is free and open source, and to the examining body's own materials.

Rules we hold ourselves to

These are commitments, not aspirations, and breaking one would require rewriting this page first.

• Placement is never sold. No company has ever paid, or could pay, to appear on a page, to be ranked above another, or to have a sentence changed.
• No commission figures on any page. The terms we have for three of these five programmes come from third-party directories that contradict each other, so we publish none of them anywhere on the site.
• Never a raw tracking link in the text. Every paid link goes through /go/, so what it points at is visible in one file rather than buried in a paragraph.
• Prices are read from the seller's own page and dated. Where a seller renders its prices only inside a checkout, we say so and print nothing.
• Free beats paid whenever it is the better answer. Four of the six stages on the self-study route have a free answer good enough that paying is optional, and the route says so.
• No coupon or promotion pages. Discount-code content is thin by construction and several sellers void unapproved codes, which would leave a reader worse off than if they had bought directly.

What we have turned down

Publishing refusals is part of the deal. A refusal written down cannot be quietly reversed later without this page changing first.

• Babbel is not linked here, because its own site does not list Japanese among the languages it teaches — its homepage linked fourteen language courses on 24 September 2026 and Japanese was not one of them. A programme we could have joined is worth less than a recommendation that would not survive a reader clicking it.
• Homework-help and answer-sharing services are refused outright, along with anything selling past exam questions that the examining body has not itself published.
• We will not write "best app" pages for products we cannot price. Several sellers here render prices only after a checkout step; we still discuss them, but we will not build a purchase-intent page around a number we invented.
• Paid guest posts, link insertions and sponsored reviews are declined. So is any arrangement where a company reviews its own product here.

If you would rather not use a paid link

Type the company's address into your browser instead. Every recommendation on this site is the same whether or not the link earns anything, and the pages are written so that you can act on them with the links ignored entirely.

If you think a placement on this site reads as though it were bought, write to the desk through the contact page and say which one. That is the most useful message we can get.