If you are learning Japanese for work, you have probably noticed that the advice changes tone. Everywhere else, people tell you to relax, make mistakes, and let the language come. For business Japanese, the same people tell you that one wrong word to a client can damage the account.
Both of those are exaggerations, but the second one is closer to true, and it has a specific reason that almost nobody states plainly.
I am a native speaker living in Tokyo, and this is the thirteenth article in a series where I test Japanese learning products against what the language actually demands of you. This one is different from the previous twelve in an uncomfortable way: for the first time, the one product here that actually pays me anything is also, honestly, the best cheap answer. I will show you exactly why, and I will spend just as many words on where it stops working.
But first, the thing that decides your first week in a Japanese office, and that no politeness slider can express.
Business Japanese is about direction, not about level
Here is a situation you will hit within days of joining a Japanese company.
Your manager is called 高橋. Inside the office you refer to him as 高橋さん or 高橋部長, with the honorific attached, because he is above you. Then a client phones and asks for him. You now say 高橋 with nothing attached, or 部長の高橋, and if you say 高橋部長 to the client you have made a real mistake — small, forgivable, instantly noticed.
Nothing about your manager changed. Nothing about your own rank changed. What changed is who is listening. In Japanese, everyone in your company is 内, inside, and the client is 外, outside. Speaking to the outside, your own side gets no honorifics, no matter how senior they are. Your company president gets referred to by bare surname to a customer.
This is called ウチソト, and it is the single most reliable thing that separates a foreigner who has worked in a Japanese office from one who has studied Japanese for six years. It cannot be represented as a level of politeness. There is no slider position that means more polite to this person, therefore less honorific about my own boss. It is a different axis entirely.
I made this argument at length in my article on casual and polite Japanese, where the finding was that every product teaches both registers and none of them makes you decide which register this listener gets. And I made it again about the grammar of honorifics in my guide to learning keigo, where the official framework from 文化庁 has five categories and the English-language products still teach three.
This article is not about that grammar. Read the keigo article for the grammar. This one is about the job: the fixed formulas, the email conventions, the phone, the reporting habits, and the specific places where the workplace and the language are the same problem.
The finding: business Japanese has its own official test, and it also cannot hear you
Most learners have never heard of it, so let me introduce it properly.
The BJT ビジネス日本語能力テスト, the Business Japanese Proficiency Test, is administered by 日本漢字能力検定協会, the same organisation behind the 漢検 kanji examinations. It is not a niche curiosity. Score 480 or above and the Japanese immigration authorities award you 15 points on the Highly Skilled Professional points system — exactly the same 15 points as passing JLPT N1. It can move your visa status and your path to permanent residency.
It is scored from 0 to 800 using item response theory, and the score maps to six levels, J5 up to J1+. J2 begins at 420 and is the level employers commonly ask for.
Now look at what it measures. The official description gives three parts:
- Part I. Listening Comprehension — 45 minutes
- Part II. Listening and Reading Comprehension — 30 minutes
- Part III. Reading Comprehension — 30 minutes
Every question is a single response to a multiple-choice question with four options.
Read that again with the office in mind. This is the test built specifically to certify that you can function in a Japanese workplace. It contains no speaking and no writing. You can reach J1+, the top band, the one described as being able to communicate sufficiently in any business situation, without ever producing one sentence of Japanese.
I found the identical structural fact when I looked at the general standard for my guide to JLPT study apps: the JLPT measures reading and listening only, at every level, entirely on a mark sheet. At the time I treated it as the explanation for why the products in this whole market are built the way they are. If the only external standard never asks for production, the market has no financial reason to build production practice, and so it does not exist.
I expected business Japanese to be the exception. Business Japanese is the one domain where output is unambiguously the job. Nobody is paid to recognise correct keigo in a list of four options. You are paid to open your mouth in front of a client.
It is not the exception. The business standard has the same shape as the general one, and it carries immigration points. That, more than anything about any individual app, is why business Japanese products look the way they do: they are all explaining, and none of them are examining.
What business Japanese actually is: slots, not sentences
The second thing that trips up learners is that they treat business Japanese as advanced Japanese. It is not. Large parts of it are less creative than ordinary conversation.
Consider お世話になっております. Every English-language guide translates it as something like thank you for your continued support, and then a learner reasons about when the translation is true. That reasoning is the mistake. You write it at the top of an email to a client you have never dealt with in your life. It is not a claim about a relationship. It is a slot, and the slot has to be filled, and filling it is the whole of the task. There is a longer variant, 平素より大変お世話になっております, for when you want more weight. There is an internal-only counterpart, お疲れ様です, which you use to colleagues and to your own boss and which is wrong to a client.
The same is true of 何卒よろしくお願いいたします at the bottom, of ご確認のほどよろしくお願いいたします when you attach a document, of 取り急ぎご連絡まで when you are being brief.
Business Japanese is a form with blanks in it. Native speakers are not being eloquent when they write these emails. We are filling in the blanks, fast, and spending our actual attention on the two or three sentences in the middle that carry the content.
English-language materials present these as useful business phrases, filed next to vocabulary, and a diligent learner then tries to compose. That is where it collapses. A learner-written business email is usually recognisable not because the grammar is wrong but because it is original, in places where originality is not wanted.
There is a second layer of this that only shows up in writing, which is why I treated it separately in my article on Japanese writing practice: a business email is a document, and documents have to hold one style all the way through. The formula at the top sets the register, and then sentence nine has to still be in it.
The cushions
The other structural feature is クッション言葉, cushion words. Requests and refusals do not begin with the request or the refusal.
- 恐れ入りますが — before asking for something
- お手数ですが — before asking somebody to do work
- 申し訳ございませんが — before declining
- 大変恐縮ですが — heavier, for a real imposition
- あいにくですが — before delivering bad availability
A grammatically perfect request with no cushion in front of it does not read as neutral in a Japanese office. It reads as an instruction. This is one of the very few areas where a learner can improve their reception dramatically in about an hour, because the list is short and the placement is mechanical.
報連相, and being honest about what an app can do
報連相 is 報告, 連絡, 相談 — report, inform, consult. It is the reason foreign employees most often get quietly marked down in Japanese companies, and it is not a language problem at all.
The expectation is that you tell your manager things before you are asked, including things that are going badly, including things that are not finished, and including things you are only thinking about. In a lot of workplaces elsewhere, going to your manager with a half-formed problem signals that you cannot handle it. In a Japanese office, not going signals that you concealed it. The failure mode is silence, and silence is what a competent, self-sufficient person naturally produces.
No Japanese learning app can fix this, because it is not vocabulary. I am putting it in this article anyway, because if you are searching for a business Japanese course, this is probably closer to your real problem than 敬語 conjugation is, and the products you are about to pay for will not tell you so. The relevant vocabulary is small: ご報告です, ご相談があるのですが, 今よろしいでしょうか. The habit is the whole thing.
The one where even natives are taught the answer
A small but genuinely useful example of why just copy the natives fails here.
了解しました means understood. For decades it was unremarkable. Somewhere in the last twenty-odd years, Japanese business etiquette books settled on the rule that 了解 is for equals and juniors, and that upward you must use 承知しました or かしこまりました. Linguists have pushed back, pointing out that 了解 has no historical rank marking and that the rule appears to have been invented by the manner books themselves.
That argument is completely irrelevant to you. What matters is that a large number of Japanese office workers were taught the rule at 新入社員研修, believe it, and will notice. Use 承知しました upward and stop thinking about it.
I raised this in the keigo article as a general principle and it applies with double force here: native Japanese adults are formally trained in business Japanese when they enter a company. It is not absorbed. There are textbooks and seminars and a whole industry. This is one of the very few areas of the language where listen to natives and imitate is genuinely poor advice, because the natives around you were themselves handed a rulebook.
How I judged the products
1. Does it teach direction, or only level? Does anything in it make you handle your own boss differently depending on who is listening?
2. Does it make you produce, under a stated relationship? Not recognise, not repeat. Produce, having been told who you are talking to.
3. Does it cover written business Japanese? Email is where most of your business Japanese will actually happen, and audio courses skip it entirely.
4. Is it teaching the language or the workplace? Both are worth money. They are not the same purchase, and a product should be clear about which one you are getting.
The comparison
| Product | Cost | Covers direction and ウチソト | Makes you produce | Written and email | Can it pay me? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JapanesePod101 business series | Subscription, tiered, discounted almost permanently | Yes, explicitly | No. Explanation and audio repetition | Partly, in the intermediate series | Yes, 25 percent |
| italki business tutors | Roughly $10 to $30 per lesson | Yes, if you ask | Yes | Yes, if you bring your drafts | Yes, at least $10 |
| ALC Online Japanese School keigo for business | Paid, 10 lessons of 50 minutes | Yes | Yes, against a stated interlocutor | Yes, email is covered | No |
| Coto Academy business course | ¥10,000 registration, then ¥43,200 for 16 lessons up to ¥232,400 for 96 | Yes | Yes, live class | Yes | No |
| Preply business tutors | Varies by tutor | Yes, if you ask | Yes | Yes, if you ask | Unverified, see below |
| Berlitz | Corporate pricing, quoted individually | Yes | Yes | Yes | No program found |
| LingoDeer | Subscription | Unverified | No | No | No program found |
| Rocket Japanese | $149.95 to $449.85 lifetime | Not found in the public curriculum | Audio and voice comparison | No | Yes, 40 percent, the highest here — I am not in it |
| Bunpro, WaniKani, Anki | Various | No. Not their subject | n/a | n/a | No |
| BJT official practice materials | Paid, from the 漢検協会 | Yes, in the reading | No. Four options | Reading only | No |
The column that matters is the last one, as always in this series. But notice that this time it does not resolve as cleanly as it did in the previous twelve articles, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
JapanesePod101 — the business series is real, and I have to declare an interest
Update, 22 August 2026: my application to the JapanesePod101 affiliate programme was approved. This section now carries a tracked link and it pays me 25 percent, on a cookie that does not expire. I wrote everything below before that happened, and I have not changed one word of the assessment since, including the part where I tell you it does not make you produce. Read it with the commission in mind, and then go and check it, because all of it is verifiable in the public lesson library without paying anything.
There are three separate series:
Business Japanese for Beginners — 25 audio lessons of roughly 8 to 10 minutes, 126 vocabulary items. The lesson list is the office year in order: introducing yourself in a meeting, asking somebody to repeat their name, greeting your boss in the morning, leaving for a client visit, the last working day of the year, the first day of the new year, a colleague being transferred, phoning and asking for somebody, switching to English, calling in sick, apologising for an absence, arriving for an appointment, souvenirs, the drinking invitation, and declining the drinking invitation.
And lesson 3 is Introducing Your Boss to a Client. It states the rule directly: when you introduce somebody from your own company to a client, you use no honorific suffix. It builds the pattern こちらが課長の高橋です, and it puts いつもお世話になっております in the dialogue where it belongs.
That is the thing I said at the top of this article decides your first week. It is lesson 3 of a beginner series. I went looking for it because I assumed no product would have it, and I was wrong. I would rather write that sentence than quietly not mention the lesson.
Doing Business in Japanese for Intermediate Learners — 15 lessons, 11 audio and 4 video, upper intermediate. This is the harder material: making extra formal requests, using humble language, showing respect with formal language, reading Japanese job postings, discussing a document, delivering a sales report, organising a meeting.
Introduction to Business Culture — 13 lessons, absolute beginner, and this one is not really language. Business cards and how to exchange them, bowing, where people sit in a meeting room, reading between the lines, drinking parties, gifts.
Where it stops, and this is the same wall as everywhere else in this series. It is audio. You listen to a dialogue, the hosts explain what happened, you repeat. At no point does anything hold you to a decision. Nothing says the client is on the phone, your boss is 高橋部長, go and then judges what you said. You will finish the beginner business series knowing the ウチソト rule as a fact, and you will still hesitate the first time a real client asks for your manager, because knowing a rule and executing it in 400 milliseconds under social pressure are different skills. That is the gap this entire series of articles keeps finding, and the best-priced product in this category does not close it either.
My honest position: for the knowledge, at this price, with the workplace situations chosen by people who know the workplace, it is the best value in this comparison, and I would say so if it paid me nothing. It is not a substitute for a human. Treat it as the reading you do before the practice.
And if you buy it and it turns out to be wrong for you, you can get the money back. JapanesePod101 puts a 60-day money-back guarantee on every paid subscription, stated in the FAQ at the foot of their pricing page — your purchase comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee – no hassles, no questions asked. I checked it again on 27 August 2026. You claim it by emailing them rather than by clicking a button, and a refund is deducted back off my commission, so the 25 percent is mine to lose. Sixty days is long enough to find out whether audio alone moves you, which is the exact question this section leaves open.
italki — the only cheap way to actually produce
Filter for tutors who list business Japanese, and book one. The reason this works is boring and important: a human is the only thing in this comparison that can specify who they are and then react. You tell the tutor to be a client of your company, and you tell them your manager is called 高橋, and then they ask for 高橋 and you find out in real time whether the rule is in your mouth or only in your notes.
You can rehearse the same scene far more cheaply with an AI, and I have written up how to make it hold a rank in my guide to AI Japanese conversation apps. Rehearse there, verify with a person.
Roughly $10 to $30 an hour, and community tutors are at the lower end. Bring three of your own real emails, with the names removed, to every lesson. That single habit converts a conversation lesson into a business Japanese lesson.
The affiliate programme officially pays at least $10 USD for a new student who makes a first purchase, with a 30-day cookie. That is the smallest commission of any product on this page and it is my top recommendation for the part that matters most, which is roughly how every article in this series has ended up.
ALC Online Japanese School — the Japanese-side answer
ALC is a long-established Japanese language education publisher, and their online school runs a keigo-for-business course of 10 lessons of 50 minutes at roughly N2 to N1 level. The description is what caught my attention: you have a short conversation with the instructor on the theme of the day, then you practise honorific language according to who you are talking to and the situation.
That is the axis. Stated interlocutor, stated situation, learner produces.
I found the identical pattern when I wrote about keigo: the products that actually make you choose the register are the ones produced in Japan, for the Japanese domestic market or by Japanese publishers, and they are close to invisible from the English-language internet. None of them pay commissions. This is the third or fourth time this has happened in this series and I no longer think it is a coincidence — a Japanese publisher builds from the assumption that the difficulty is the choosing, because that is what Japanese people themselves are trained on.
Coto Academy — if you are in Tokyo or can do evenings
Coto runs a business Japanese course in Tokyo and online, in four levels spanning roughly N4 through N2. Registration is ¥10,000 once. From there the packages run ¥43,200 for 16 lessons, ¥83,200 for 32, ¥120,000 for 48, and ¥232,400 for 96, or a subscription at ¥20,000 for two lessons a week. Classes are 50 or 100 minutes, mostly weekday evenings around 19:10 to 21:00 or Saturday afternoons, which is the schedule of a school that expects its students to have jobs.
The content is the standard professional syllabus: keigo, business vocabulary, email and phone etiquette, meeting language, business cards, proposals, negotiation, presentations, and workplace hierarchy.
The reason to pay this rather than book italki hours is the group. A business Japanese class contains other people who have to be addressed, which means the relationships are real inside the room. That is difficult to replicate one-to-one.
Preply, Berlitz, LingoDeer, Rocket — what I could and could not verify
Preply has business Japanese tutors and works the same way as italki. On the commission side I have to be straight with you: the affiliate programme runs through several networks with different terms, the public figures I found disagree with each other badly, and the official partner page returned an error for me. I have not verified what Preply pays, so I am not going to quote a number, and I have no link to it.
Berlitz runs business language training and has done for a very long time. Pricing is quoted per client rather than published. I could not find an affiliate programme for Berlitz on any of the major networks.
LingoDeer is frequently described in secondary reviews as having business Japanese and keigo units. I could not confirm this on the official site, which advertises no business course, and I have not paid for the app. Unverified, and I would not buy it on the strength of a review that might be describing something else. Separately, LingoDeer has no speaking exercises at all, which rules it out for the part of business Japanese that matters most.
Rocket Japanese pays the highest commission of anything in this comparison, at 40 percent. I could not find a business, office, or keigo lesson in the public Rocket Japanese curriculum. The public lesson index covers greetings, travel, food, health, dating, sport, the writing systems, and so on, with no professional module visible. I have also established previously that Rocket maps its own three levels to N5 and N4 by their own published statement, which puts the ceiling below where business Japanese starts. I have not paid for the course, so treat this as not found rather than proven absent — but I am not able to recommend the highest-paying product on this page for this purpose, which is a sentence I have now written in most articles in this series.
What I would actually do
If you are below N4 and have just been offered a job in Japan: JapanesePod101 Introduction to Business Culture and Business Japanese for Beginners, in that order, over about six weeks. Then one italki lesson a week where you role-play the same situations with a person. Do not try to learn keigo grammar systematically yet. Learn the fixed formulas and the ウチソト rule, which is a small amount of material with an enormous return.
If you are around N3 and already working: the emails are your real curriculum. Bring your own outgoing mail to a tutor. In parallel, work through the keigo system properly, using my keigo comparison, because at this level people have stopped forgiving you.
If you are N2 and preparing for promotion or a visa: the BJT is worth taking, both for the 15 points and because the reading section is genuinely a good model of the documents you will face. Prepare for it with official practice materials, and then, separately, fix your production with a human, because the test will never tell you whether your production is any good.
If your company has a training budget: ask for Coto, Berlitz, or an ALC-style course before you ask for an app subscription. Companies in Japan routinely fund this and routinely do not advertise that they do.
The limit of everything on this page
The largest single factor in how your business Japanese is received is not your Japanese. It is which company you joined.
A Tokyo office of a foreign firm may run its meetings in English and be entirely relaxed about 了解しました. A traditional domestic manufacturer will notice the seating in the meeting room. The same email lands differently in the two places, and no app knows which one you are in.
So the highest-leverage thing you can do costs nothing: ask one colleague to read your first ten emails before you send them. Say you are working on your business Japanese and would like the corrections. In my experience Japanese colleagues are pleased to be asked, are far more precise about the formulas than any teacher, and — this is the part that matters — they know your company. Ten emails is enough to install the templates. After that you are filling in blanks like the rest of us, and spending your attention on the content, which is where it belonged all along.
This is the thirteenth article in a series testing Japanese learning products against the language as it is actually used. If you are choosing your first tool, start with the main comparison. For the honorific system underneath all of this, see learning keigo. For the choice between polite and casual outside the office, see casual Japanese. For why the standard tests shape the whole market, see JLPT study apps.