Learn to hold real Japanese conversations about the topics that matter to you. A consultant checks your level and builds a plan around your goal, topics and available time.
Trusted by 5,000+ learners worldwide · As seen on TV TOKYO
Six parts of your week that switch from grey (Japanese out of reach) to red (you, speaking):
Which circles are still grey in your week? That’s what we build next — one story at a time.
Greetings, self-intro, café/restaurant, first 30-min everyday conversation.
Transport, banking, doctor, neighbours, complaints, making friends.
Career, presentations, negotiation, finance, culture.
The 2-Month Master Course is the Level 1 starting stage — not a one-size guarantee.
A consultant checks your speaking level and your real goal.
Pick from 50 topics (or your own); decide how long/deep to speak on each.
Your coach builds sessions with role-plays and Conversation Flow.
Every route to Japanese has a price — in money, in hours, and in what you can actually do at the end. Before you look at our price, look at the whole market:
| Route | What you pay | Time and effort | What you can do at the end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apps (Duolingo — the most popular) | Free; Super ≈ $7–13/mo; Max ≈ $30/mo [source] | 5–15 min a day of tapping, matching, multiple-choice — for years | Vocabulary and reading recognition. You have never had a real conversation with a Japanese person inside the app. |
| Online tutor marketplaces (italki, Preply) | ≈ $15–40 / hour, set by each tutor [source] | You design the curriculum; the method changes with every tutor. Anyone can list as a “community tutor” — no teaching experience or training required | Casual practice and a friendly connection with a Japanese person. No method, no level pathway, no one accountable for your result. |
| Language schools in Tokyo (e.g. Coto Academy, one-year visa schools) | Intensive ≈ ¥360,000 / 12 weeks (~$2,400) [source]; one-year visa course ¥700,000–1,300,000 (~$4,700–8,700) + living in Tokyo [source] | 15–20 classroom hours a week, JLPT track: kanji, grammar, reading, listening tests. The JLPT has no speaking section. N2 ≈ 1,200–2,400 study hours [source] | A certificate. Many graduates read a menu and pass a test but freeze in conversation — speaking was never measured. |
| Top universities (Harvard, Cambridge) | Harvard Extension ≈ $1,600–2,200 per semester course [source]; Harvard College tuition ≈ $62,000 / year [source]; Cambridge Language Centre ≈ £365 / term [source] | Academic terms, grammar-and-kanji sequencing, exams; a degree track is four years | Excellent for literature, research and reading. Not designed to make you hold a conversation in the shortest time — nowhere in that price is 100% of the time spent speaking. |
| Japan Language Factory — Master Course | $4,000–25,000 USD depending on where you start and how far you go. Monthly payment plans available. | 100% customised. Before you enrol, a professional assesses how much you can already speak and sets your goal with you on a free consultation; your course is designed from that point — from a 2-month course to a 1–2 year programme. No wasted study. | Real-life conversation at the level you chose. 1-on-1 with a bilingual coach who has completed 100+ hours of JLF coaching training. 100% speaking and listening — no kanji tests, no grammar tables. |
Figures checked September 2026, ¥150 = $1. Re-checked yearly.
They look similar — one Japanese person, one learner, a video call. But they were built for different things. Tutor marketplaces exist so that anyone who speaks Japanese can earn a little money online, and so that learners can easily meet a Japanese speaker. That is a good thing — for language exchange and casual practice. But most tutors have never been trained to teach, there is no shared method, and no one is responsible for whether you can speak at the end. At JLF, nobody can work as a coach without completing 100+ hours of bilingual coaching training. Every coach is a native, bilingual, professionally trained coach, and every session uses the same method: 100% real-life conversation, built on Conversation Flow and Muscle Memory Training. You are not buying an hour of someone’s time. You are buying a result.
None of the routes above is bad. They are built for something else — passing a test, earning credit, or a habit on your phone. What none of them does is put you in front of a professionally trained native coach and spend 100% of the time on speaking and listening, in real-life situations, from the very first session. That is the only thing we do.
And none of them starts where we start: before you enrol, a professional assesses how much you can already speak and sets a goal with you, on a free consultation. Your course is designed from that assessment — 100% customised to what you want to be able to say. That is how you avoid wasted study.
Because “learn Japanese” means very different things:
Short questionnaire: your goal, the topics you want to talk about, how much time you can practise.
A professional assesses how much you can already speak and sets your goal with you.
1-on-1 with a native, bilingual coach — 100% speaking and listening, from the first session.
Japan Language Factory was founded by Terumi Kai, born and raised in Japan. Like most Japanese people, she started out speaking only Japanese. She loved Western culture and wanted to live abroad, so she set out to find the fastest way to actually speak English — and built her own method to do it.
Then she tested it on herself. She moved to Europe alone, learned English and Greek at the same time with this method, and is now learning German the same way. JLF is not a marketplace of people teaching Japanese for pocket money. It is a learning structure built from zero by a founder who went from monolingual to multilingual with it.
The problem she set out to solve: almost all language education is designed as an academic subject. You start with the alphabet, spelling tests, grammar tests — it takes years, and there is no guarantee you will ever speak. Her goal was the opposite: 100% focus on speaking, in the shortest possible time.
So the method follows the process every Japanese baby goes through to speak Japanese — listen, imitate, respond, get corrected, repeat — and applies it to adults learning a new language. This is bilingual and multilingual training, not “studying a language.” That is the philosophy behind everything we do: not to study Japanese, but to speak it, as fast as humanly possible.
01 Expressing — you say it · 02 Question — you ask · 03 Listening — you catch the answer · 04 Feedback — your coach corrects, you repeat.
Every round of 01→02→03→04 keeps the conversation alive. One more round = longer holding: 20 seconds → 5 minutes → 15 minutes → 30 minutes.
“And having native Japanese coaches who speak fluent English is a big deal for me. I need someone to explain why something is said that way. Duolingo can’t do that.”
— William Muterspaugh (USA)
For a beginner aiming at travel/everyday conversation, often yes. Business-level usually needs a longer pathway.
No — they’re planning examples. Your consultant prioritises what’s relevant to you.
Yes — personal, professional, business, history or entertainment topics at any level.
Between $4,000 and $25,000 USD, depending on how much you can already speak and how far you want to go (everyday conversation in about 2 months, or business fluency over 1–2 years). Monthly payment plans are available. Your course is 100% customised: a professional assesses your speaking level and sets your goal with you on a free consultation, then designs the course from there.
Book a consultation and create your personalised Master Course plan.