Affiliate disclosure: some links in my articles are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you buy through one, at no extra cost to you. As of 4 September 2026 I have four approved affiliate partnerships. One of them is JapanesePod101, which is one of the products I assess on this page, and it pays 25 percent on a cookie that does not expire. Two of the others are Japanese knife retailers and have nothing to do with language learning. The fourth is The Japan Shop, a bookshop approved on 4 September 2026, and that one does sell Japanese learning material of the kind this page is about, so I am naming it rather than calling it unrelated. There is no link to it on this page. Other pages here do carry links to that shop, the largest being in my guide to starting to read Japanese, and my affiliate disclosure page keeps the full list current. There are no tracked links on this page, so it currently earns me nothing today, and every judgement below was written before any of those approvals and has not been changed since. Before you start, two things worth knowing: the products that would pay me the most are the two that turned out to teach this subject the least, and the only software I found that drills the actual difficulty is written in Japanese for Japanese people and pays nobody anything.
There is one fact about Japanese honorific language that changes how you should approach the whole subject, and almost no English-language guide leads with it.
Japanese people are formally taught keigo as adults. Not in childhood, not by absorption. Companies run keigo training for new graduates in their first weeks of employment, because a twenty-two-year-old who has spoken Japanese natively since birth cannot reliably produce the language their job requires. There is an entire genre of Japanese business books about it. I went through this myself.
Sit with what that means for you. In every other area of this language, “listen to natives and copy them” is decent advice. For keigo it is close to useless, because the natives around you are working from training they received as adults, applying it unevenly, and getting it wrong often enough that their errors have their own name — バイト敬語, the mangled honorifics of part-time service work, is a term ordinary people use.
So the standard you are being held to is not “speak like a native.” It is “speak like a native who paid attention during onboarding.” That is a fairer fight than it looks, and it changes what you should want from a learning product.
Here is the short answer, and then the problem with it.
JapanesePod101 has a twenty-five lesson series built entirely on keigo, and it is the most substantial coverage in any mainstream product. Bunpro is the only one that makes you produce the forms yourself. Rocket Japanese has essentially nothing on the subject, and Pimsleur publishes a keigo guide on its blog while not teaching it in the course. That is the ranking. You can act on it.
Now the problem: every one of them is teaching a model of keigo that the language authority of Japan replaced in 2007, and the piece that was added is precisely the piece learners get wrong.
The three-type model you were taught is officially obsolete
Open any English-language guide to keigo and you will get three categories: 尊敬語, sonkeigo, the honorific that raises the other person, 謙譲語, kenjougo, the humble form that lowers you, and 丁寧語, teineigo, the everyday politeness of です／ます. Coto, Tofugu, Preply, the app store listings, the school blogs. Three types. Universal.
On 2 February 2007, the Japanese Council for Cultural Affairs published 敬語の指針, the formal government guidance on honorific language. It sets out five categories, not three. 謙譲語 is split in two, and 丁寧語 is split into 丁寧語 and 美化語, beautification: the お in お茶 and the ご in ご飯.
The split that matters is the first one, and it is defined by direction:
- 謙譲語Ⅰ covers, in the wording of that document, actions of yours directed toward the other party or a third party, where you elevate the person the action goes to. 伺う, 申し上げる, お目に掛かる, 差し上げる.
- 謙譲語Ⅱ, also called 丁重語, covers your own actions described politely to your listener — the action is not directed at anyone in particular. 参る, 申す, いたす, おる.
If you have been taught three types, both columns were handed to you as one undifferentiated pile labelled “humble,” and you were left to work out from example sentences which one goes where. Most learners never do, and the error it produces is completely predictable.
伺う and 参る both get glossed as “to go, humble form.” They are not interchangeable.
伺う means going to where you are, or to a place connected to the person you are honouring. 参る means going, described formally, with no such target. So:
- 明日、御社に伺います — I will visit your company tomorrow. Correct. The action is aimed at the listener.
- 明日、大阪に参ります — I am going to Osaka tomorrow. Correct. Osaka is not the listener.
- 明日、大阪に伺います — wrong, unless the listener is the person in Osaka. You have grammatically elevated a city.
That last sentence is one learners produce constantly, because it is exactly what the three-type model predicts they should say. They learned 伺う as “the humble version of 行く,” and they applied it. The model was the error, not the learner.
I do not raise this to be pedantic about a government document. I raise it because this is the difference between keigo as a vocabulary substitution table and keigo as what it actually is: a system for encoding direction.
Keigo is a direction, not a level
The mental picture almost every product gives you is a dial. Casual at the bottom, です／ます in the middle, keigo at the top, and your job is to turn the dial up when the situation is formal.
That picture will get you through a job interview and then fail you in your first week at work.
Keigo does not describe how respectful you are being in general. It marks, sentence by sentence, whose action is being described and which way the respect is pointing. The same event takes a different form depending on who performed it:
- My manager is coming → 部長がいらっしゃいます — sonkeigo, his action, elevated
- I am coming → 伺います — kenjougo I, my action, aimed at you
- Both in one sentence, and you must not mix them up.
Get the direction backwards and you produce the single most recognisable learner error in the language: using humble forms about the actions of another person, which lowers them, or honorific forms about your own, which elevates yourself. 部長が伺います is not a small slip. You have just described your boss as humbling himself toward the client. The grammar is flawless.
And there is a second axis stacked on top, which I have written about before. Whether you use honorific language about a person depends on whether they are inside or outside your group at that moment. Speaking to a client about my own manager, I strip the honorifics off him entirely — 部長はおりません rather than いらっしゃいません — because relative to the client, my manager is on my side of the line. This is the same 内/外 logic that makes politeness levels impossible to represent as a slider, and in keigo it becomes mandatory rather than merely advisable. If you are learning this for a job, the workplace side of it — the fixed email formulas, the phone, 報連相 — is covered separately in my guide to business Japanese courses.
So the real question to ask a learning product is not does it teach keigo. It is: does it ever make you decide whose action it is, and which way the respect points?
How I judged these
Three questions, in order.
1. Does it teach keigo at all? Real coverage, not a single lesson mentioning that honorific language exists.
2. Does it make you produce the forms? Recognition is not production. Reading 伺う and understanding it is a different skill from generating it under time pressure.
3. Does it make you choose the direction? The actual test. Given a situation — whose action, aimed at whom, who is inside your group right now — does the product ever require you to pick the right form without telling you which category to use?
The comparison
| Product | Teaches keigo? | Makes you produce it? | Makes you choose the direction? | Can it pay me? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JapanesePod101 | Yes. A 25-lesson series plus a business course | Weak. Listening and explanation | No. The category is always given to you | Yes |
| Bunpro | Yes. Honorific and humble grammar points at N4 and N3 | Yes. You type the form. The only one here | No. The hint names the form before you answer | No — points, not cash |
| Japanese-language keigo apps | Yes, and most seriously | Yes, by quiz | Closest to yes — but not built for you | No — nothing, from any of them |
| A tutor on italki | Depends entirely on the tutor | Yes | Yes, if you ask for it specifically | ~$10 |
| Pimsleur | Barely. Polite throughout; a blog post, not a course | Yes, in one register | No | Yes, and the most per sale |
| Rocket Japanese | No dedicated material I could find | Not applicable | No | Yes, and at the highest rate — I am not in it |
| WaniKani | No. Kanji only, and honest about it | No | No | No — no affiliate program exists |
| Rosetta Stone | No | No | No | Yes, and I still say skip it |
Product by product
JapanesePod101 — the most keigo content in any mainstream product
There is a dedicated series, Getting Started with Keigo, running to twenty-five audio lessons in the Upper Beginner library, plus a separate Doing Business in Japanese course at intermediate level. I checked the library directly. Individual lessons do the work you would want: one covers how to form humble verbs, another covers honorific verbs as a set.
What it does not do is separate the two humble categories, and the teaching is integrated rather than systematic — keigo arrives inside situational dialogues rather than as a structure you are walked through and then tested on. You will finish the series understanding what these forms are. You will not have been made to choose one under pressure, because the format cannot ask you to.
For the money, and for the fact that it is the only mainstream product treating keigo as a subject in its own right, this is where I would start. Can it pay me? Yes.
Bunpro — the only one that makes you type it
I searched the Bunpro grammar library specifically for honorific material and it is properly stocked: お〜になる, なさる, お〜ください, いらっしゃる, ございます, でございます, お〜する, いたす and ていただけませんか at N4, させてもらう at N3.
That means Bunpro is the one product on this page where the honorific form has to come out of your own head into a text box. That is worth a great deal, and it is the same thing I said about Bunpro in the article on casual speech: it is the only tool in this category that requires production rather than recognition.
The ceiling is the same one too. The review hint tells you which form is wanted. You are being asked to conjugate, not to decide. A fill-in-the-blank cannot present you with “your manager is going to the client office, and you are on the phone with the client” and let you get it wrong in an interesting way. Can it pay me? No — points, not cash.
The Japanese-language keigo apps — the closest thing to the right exercise, and invisible to you
This is the finding I did not expect.
Search the app stores for keigo and you will surface a small group of dedicated apps — KeiGo JP, 敬語マスター, also listed as KeigoMaster,, Japanese Keigo Quiz among them. They rank in search results for English keigo queries, which is itself a sign of how little competition there is.
These are, for the most part, written in Japanese, for Japanese people, about using keigo at work. the KeigoMaster store listing describes quiz-based practice for on-the-job honorifics, and says it generates sentences appropriate to your relationship with the other person and the situation — which is, on the face of it, the only description I have read anywhere that names the actual variable. Japanese Keigo Quiz drills the respectful, humble and polite forms as a quiz.
Two honest caveats. I have not installed these and I am not reviewing their quality — I am reporting what their store listings say, and I could not retrieve the full listings directly, only through search. And a Japanese-language interface makes them hard going unless your reading is already decent.
But the structural point stands, and it is uncomfortable. The software that drills keigo as a decision exists. It was built for the people who need it professionally, in their own language, and it earns me nothing. The English-language learning industry, which is the part with the affiliate programs, has not built it.
A tutor — the only way to be corrected
Everything above can teach you the system. None of it can tell you that the sentence you just said about your manager was subtly wrong, because none of it was listening.
Keigo has the same cruel property I described for politeness levels: errors are almost never corrected in the wild. A client hearing a foreign vendor say 部長が伺います will understand perfectly, register that the Japanese was slightly off, and say nothing at all. You can make the same error for three years.
So book a tutor and be specific. Do not ask for “keigo practice” — you will get a vocabulary list. Ask them to give you situations and make you produce the sentence: your section chief is out; a client calls; tell them. You want to visit their office on Thursday; ask. Your manager wants to know if their president received the document. Ten of those with corrections is worth more than the entire twenty-five lesson series, and it is the only exercise on this page that tests direction rather than form.
italki pays about ten dollars for the first purchase by a new student, which is the smallest commission of anything I have mentioned. Can it pay me? About ten dollars.
Pimsleur — a keigo guide on the blog, and not much in the course
The Pimsleur course is polite Japanese throughout, which I have said before is a defensible design choice. What is odd is that the company publishes a comprehensive guide to Japanese honorifics on its own blog — the marketing side of the business has produced the explanation that the teaching side does not deliver.
I have not subscribed, so I am reporting the consistent finding of independent reviews rather than my own audit: honorifics are touched on and not taught in depth. Given the price point, and given that this is the product with the largest commission I could earn on this entire page, I want to be clear that it is going into the bottom half of this ranking. Can it pay me? Yes, and the most per sale.
Rocket Japanese — nothing I could find
I went through the Rocket Japanese lesson listing looking for keigo, sonkeigo, kenjougo, or business Japanese, and found none of them. The nearest thing is a set of lessons on Japanese salutations, described as helping you “hone your manners and show politeness.”
This is now the third consecutive article in which I have marked Rocket down, so let me be fair about the pattern. Rocket is a well-built beginner-to-intermediate course, the most complete single course I compared, and it does teach politeness levels earlier and more deliberately than most. Keigo is simply outside its scope. A product is allowed to have a scope. But if honorific language is the reason you are shopping, it is not this one — and the Rocket content-partner programme pays the highest rate of anything here, which is exactly why I want that stated plainly. Can it pay me? Yes, at the highest rate here — I am not in that programme.
WaniKani and Rosetta Stone — out of scope, for opposite reasons
WaniKani teaches kanji and vocabulary and does not pretend to touch grammar or register. It stays on this list because it is the product I recommend most often overall and it has no affiliate program in existence.
The Rosetta Stone method — inferring meaning from images, without explanation in your own language — cannot convey a system whose entire content is social direction. You cannot photograph the difference between 伺う and 参る. It would pay me a commission. Can it pay me? Yes, and no.
What natives actually get wrong, and what that tells you
Since Japanese people are trained in this as adults, it follows that Japanese people also fail at it as adults. Knowing the common native errors is useful to you for two reasons: you will hear them constantly and should not copy them, and knowing they exist should lower your anxiety considerably.
Written Japanese has a matching rule that no English-language product teaches, which I cover in my guide to Japanese writing practice apps.
二重敬語, double keigo — stacking honorifics that already contain one. お伺いさせていただきます is the classic: 伺う is already humble, and it has been wrapped in two further layers of deference. It is extremely common in business email, widely taught as incorrect, and increasingly tolerated because so many people do it. A learner who studies hard produces this by accident, from exactly the right instinct.
バイト敬語 — the service-industry dialect. こちら、コーヒーになります, in which the coffee “becomes”, よろしかったでしょうか, past tense for a present question, お会計のほう, a vague “direction” softener attached to nothing. You will hear these dozens of times a day in shops. They are not a model to learn from, and Japanese people complain about them in newspaper columns.
Getting the direction wrong under pressure. Natives do this too, particularly on the phone, particularly when a sentence involves three people. The system is genuinely hard.
Here is what I want you to take from that. Your keigo will not be graded against a perfect speaker, because there is not one on the other side of the desk. It will be graded against the effort being visible. A foreign colleague who reliably produces お世話になっております, よろしくお願いいたします, 恐れ入りますが and 承知いたしました, and who keeps the direction straight on the sentences that matter, is doing better than a fair number of Japanese people three years into their careers.
The fifth category, and the お trap
I said the 2007 guidance splits keigo into five, and then I only used the first split. The other one is worth two minutes of your time, because it is where learners are most visibly foreign in a way that has nothing to do with respect.
美化語 — beautification — is the お and ご that get attached to nouns to make the speech itself more refined: お茶 for tea, お水 for water, ご飯 for rice or a meal, お金 for money. The reason it was separated out from ordinary politeness is that it is not about the listener at all. When I say お茶, I am not elevating you, and I am not humbling myself. I am speaking in a more refined way, full stop. It says something about me, not about us.
This has one enormous practical consequence: お is not a politeness marker you can attach at will. Learners who understand it as “add お to be polite” produce a specific and instantly recognisable set of errors.
- お is largely fixed by word. お茶, お金, お皿, ご飯, ご住所 are conventional. There is no general rule you can apply to a new noun and be safe.
- It does not go on foreign loanwords. おビール is a joke, and a well-known one. お is Japanese-native vocabulary territory; the katakana half of the language does not take it.
- It does not go on your own things in humble contexts. The opinion of another person is ご意見; yours is 意見. Attaching the honorific prefix to your own possessions is the noun-level version of using honorific verbs about yourself.
- Over-application reads as parody. There is a register of speech — associated with a certain kind of affected politeness — built out of putting お on everything, and it is used comically. A learner reaching for maximum politeness can land there by accident.
The advice is unusually simple for this subject: learn お words as whole words, the way you learned them for gender in French. Do not learn 茶 and a rule. Learn お茶. Every product on this page will feed you these forms in context, which is the correct way to acquire them, and no product will warn you not to generalise the pattern. This paragraph is the warning.
So what should you actually do
Learn four fixed phrases before you learn any grammar. お世話になっております to open, よろしくお願いいたします to close, 恐れ入りますが before an imposition, 承知いたしました to accept an instruction. A startling proportion of real workplace keigo is formulaic, and these four will carry you through more situations than any verb table. They also cannot be got wrong in the way conjugation can.
Learn the verb pairs as pairs, by direction, not as a vocabulary list. For each verb, learn the honorific and the humble side by side with a person attached: いらっしゃる is my manager, 伺う is me, going to you, 参る is me, going somewhere. If you learn them as a substitution table you will build the exact error the three-type model produces.
Use Bunpro for the forms and JapanesePod101 for the system. That is the practical stack. Bunpro gets the conjugations into your fingers; the JapanesePod101 series gives you the situational sense that a grammar drill cannot.
Then get a human to run direction drills on you. Ten scenarios, corrected. This is the only step on the list that tests the thing the whole article is about, and it is the cheapest one after the free ones.
And do not wait until your keigo is good to use it. The alternative to imperfect keigo is not perfect keigo, it is です／ます, which in a business context reads as someone who has not tried. Trying and slightly missing is read as respect. That is the actual scoring system.
One last thing, from my side of it
I remember the training. A room of new graduates, all native speakers, being taught to answer a telephone. We practised saying the name of our own company without an honorific and the name of the client with one, over and over, because under pressure people reach for the polite form and elevate their own employer, which sounds absurd and which all of us did at least once.
Nobody in that room thought this was unfair or strange. It is understood in Japan that keigo is a professional skill you acquire on entry, like formatting a document properly.
I think learners carry an unnecessary weight about this — a belief that natives glide through honorific language effortlessly and that struggling with it marks you as an outsider. We do not, and it does not. We were taught it late, we get it wrong, and the people who are best at it are the ones who were drilled on scenarios rather than tables.
Which is exactly the training that is not available to you in English, from any product I can find. Until it is, you will have to assemble it: forms from Bunpro, the system from JapanesePod101, the four phrases from this page, and the direction drills from a person who will tell you when you have just been humble at your own boss.