Ask which textbook to start Japanese with and you will be handed the same two names, and usually the same tiebreaker. Genki is the friendly one written for American university classes. Minna no Nihongo is the serious one, the book they actually use in Japan, the one you graduate to when you want to stop playing around.
The second half of that is true. I checked, and the margin is wider than anyone in English says it is.
It is also the reason most people reading this in English should not buy it.
This is the sixteenth piece in a series where I test Japanese learning products against the language as it is used here. I am a native speaker, I live in Tokyo, and this one is unusual for the series because the Japanese sources are not hiding anything. Both publishers state exactly what their book is and who it is for. The information is simply on Japanese pages, in Japanese, and the English discussion has been arguing without it.
What I earn from this page
One product on this page is available through a shop that pays me, and it is a single volume of one of the two books. Everything else here I earn nothing from. There is no affiliate programme in this article for Minna no Nihongo at all, so if you finish reading and buy Minna, I am paid nothing. I have written the comparison as if that were not true, and you can judge whether I managed it.
The number, before anything else
Japanese language schools in Japan are surveyed every year by a trade publication called 日本語学校全調査, published by エスアイケイアイ出版部 and known in the business as the red book. It sends a questionnaire to the schools designated by the Ministry of Justice, plus university preparatory courses and vocational school Japanese departments.
For the beginner textbook question, 456 schools answered, a response rate of 92.6 percent. Here is what they use as their main beginner text:
- Minna no Nihongo — 338 schools, 74.1 percent
- Dekiru Nihongo — 31 schools, 6.7 percent
- Daichi — 18 schools, 3.9 percent
- Bunka Shokyuu — 15 schools, 3.2 percent
- Genki — 2 schools, 0.4 percent
Three hundred and thirty eight to two.
I want to be straight about the sourcing, because this number is the spine of the article. I have not read the red book itself. I am reading the figures as summarised by a Japanese resource site for Japanese teachers, from the 2018 edition. That site also offers estimates of how many copies each book sells, and it labels those estimates as guesses, so I am not repeating them. The school counts are what I am using, and they are the kind of figure a trade survey is good at.
So the English consensus is right. If you walk into a Japanese language school in Japan, the book on the desk is Minna no Nihongo, and it is not close.
Now here is the part the consensus skips: that survey is a survey of classrooms. Every one of those 456 institutions has a teacher standing at the front of a room. The number tells you what works in that setting. It tells you nothing about what works on your sofa in Ohio, and the publisher is the one who makes that distinction, not me.
What the publisher says the book is for
Here is how スリーエーネットワーク, the publisher of Minna no Nihongo, describes its own book. This is the official page for the third edition of volume 1:
日本語を初めて学ぶ人がだれでも楽しく学べるように、また教える人にとっても興味深く教えられるように作られた総合教材です
A complete set of materials made so that anyone learning Japanese for the first time can enjoy it, and also so that the person teaching can teach it with interest.
The page for the previous edition says the same thing more bluntly:
教える人にとっても教えやすいように作られた
Made so that the person teaching finds it easy to teach.
Two editions, and both of them name a second user. There is a teacher designed into this book.
Now the same kind of statement from ジャパンタイムズ出版 about Genki, from the official third edition site:
文法説明は自分で予習できるよう、できるだけ専門用語を使わずわかりやすい英語で書かれている
The grammar explanations are written in plain English, avoiding technical terms as far as possible, so that you can prepare them by yourself in advance.
Two publishers, two sentences, and between them the entire question is answered. One book is built so a teacher can run a room with it. The other is built so a learner can walk into a room already understanding the grammar, or never walk into a room at all.
Neither sentence is marketing fluff that I am over-reading. They are the design briefs, stated by the people who wrote the books.
The book that arrives with no English in it
This is the part that costs people money, and I have never seen it stated plainly in English.
The main Minna no Nihongo volume, the 本冊, contains no English. Not a reduced amount of English. None. Here is the publisher describing the second edition of volume 1, in a sentence I have never seen quoted in English:
表記は日本語（漢字かな交じり）のみです。
The text is in Japanese only, kanji mixed with kana.
The third edition page no longer carries that sentence, so let me be exact about what I can prove. The structure has not changed, and the publisher demonstrates it on the third edition page itself, where the book you also need is listed as a separate purchase:
副教材の『翻訳・文法解説』（15か国語版刊行予定・別売り）
The supplementary volume Translation and Grammatical Notes, in fifteen language versions, sold separately.
Grammar explanations, vocabulary glosses and exercise instructions are not in the main book. They are in that one.
So a buyer outside Japan who orders the famous book, the one the schools use, the one with the recognisable cover, receives a book they cannot read a single instruction in. This is not a trap the publisher is setting. It is stated on the product page. It is just stated in Japanese, on a Japanese page, while the English discussion happens somewhere else.
Genki has no equivalent split. The English is in the book.
What the two actually cost a buyer outside Japan
Once you know about the second volume, the price comparison changes shape. Here are the publisher list prices, tax included, as of today.
Minna no Nihongo, third edition, to cover the full beginner course:
- 初級Ⅰ 本冊 — 2,750 yen
- 初級Ⅱ 本冊 — 2,750 yen
- 初級Ⅰ 翻訳・文法解説 English version — 2,000 yen
- 初級Ⅱ 翻訳・文法解説 English version — 2,000 yen
- Total: 9,500 yen, four books
Genki, third edition, to cover the full beginner course:
- げんき 1 — 3,960 yen
- げんき 2 — 3,960 yen
- Total: 7,920 yen, two books
The book that looks cheaper on a shelf is the more expensive one for you, by about sixteen hundred yen, and it arrives as four objects instead of two.
I should be fair to Minna here in two ways. First, a classroom buys the 本冊 in bulk and the school supplies the rest, so inside a school the economics are completely different. Second, if your native language is not English, Minna gives you fifteen translated versions to pick from and Genki gives you one. For a Vietnamese or Burmese speaker, Minna is the book with a translation and Genki is the book without one. That is a real advantage and it is invisible from inside English.
The same destination, a hundred hours apart
Both publishers state how long their course takes and where it lands you. They are unusually specific, and nobody in English seems to have put the numbers side by side.
Minna no Nihongo, third edition:
- 25 lessons per volume, two volumes, 50 lessons
- 4 to 6 hours per lesson, about 150 hours per volume, so about 300 hours
- about 1,000 words per volume, about 2,000 words
- Volume 1 is described as 初級前半, roughly N5. Volume 2 as 初級後半, roughly N4
Genki, third edition:
- 23 lessons total, volume 1 covering lessons 1 to 12 and volume 2 covering 13 to 23
- about 200 hours for all 23 lessons, six hours per lesson in the conversation and grammar section plus three in the reading and writing section
- about 1,700 words
- 317 kanji, 145 in the first volume and 172 in the second, described by the publisher as N4 and N5 level
- Volume 1 ends at N5 or CEFR A1, volume 2 at N4 or CEFR A2
Same finish line. Minna takes about a hundred hours and three hundred words more to reach it.
Do not read that as Minna being inefficient. Read it as more material, which is exactly what you want when a teacher is pacing you through a two-year visa course and needs something to fill it with. Three hundred extra vocabulary items is three hundred extra vocabulary items. The question is only whether you personally have three hundred hours and somebody to spend them with.
If you want to know why the two books can describe the same grammar so differently in the first place, I wrote about the two grammars Japan teaches earlier in this series. And if N4 and N5 are just noises to you so far, what the JLPT actually measures covers what those labels are worth.
What changed in the third edition, and the trap that is live right now
Minna no Nihongo has been in print since its first edition in 1998. The publisher began rolling out the third edition in autumn 2025. Volume 1 of the third edition was issued on 23 October 2025. Volume 2 followed on 15 April 2026.
What changed, in the words of the publisher:
現在の状況に合うように会話場面・語彙・表現の見直しを行います。文法シラバスや各課の構成に大きな変更はありません
The conversation situations, vocabulary and expressions have been reviewed to fit the present day. There are no major changes to the grammar syllabus or to the structure of each lesson.
So the bones are the same and the flesh is newer. One genuinely useful change: the audio that used to ship on a CD is now distributed free through the publisher website and an audio app.
Here is the live problem. The publisher also says this:
『第３版』発行後も、『第２版』は当面、継続して販売いたします
After the third edition is issued, the second edition will continue to be sold for the time being.
Both editions are on sale at once. And on the day I wrote this, the official product page for the second edition of volume 1 still carried this line:
★改訂版（第３版）を発行予定です。
A revised third edition is scheduled for publication.
Scheduled. The third edition of that volume came out eleven months ago. If you land on that page, or on any overseas listing that copied its text, you are being told a revision is coming when it has already arrived, while the older book sits there available to buy.
Check the ISBN before you pay. Third edition volume 1 is 9784868410003 and volume 2 is 9784868410065. And make sure any 翻訳・文法解説 you buy is the matching third edition, because the vocabulary was revised and a second edition translation volume will drift against a third edition main volume.
Which one is for you
I am not going to pretend this has one answer, because it has two and they are clean.
Buy Minna no Nihongo if you are about to sit in a classroom. If you are enrolling in a language school in Japan, or your university course has chosen it, or you have a tutor who will run lessons out of it, then you are the reader it was built for, and 74.1 percent of Japanese language schools have already checked its work for you. Buy the 本冊 and the matching 翻訳・文法解説 together, both third edition.
Buy Genki if you are learning by yourself. The English is inside the book because the book expects nobody to explain anything to you. Two volumes instead of four, about two hundred hours instead of three hundred, and the same N4 at the end.
The tiebreaker people use in English, which book do Japanese schools use, is real data being asked to answer a question it was never about. It measures what survives in a classroom. If you do not have a classroom, it is measuring something you do not have.
There is a third answer that I have to mention because it is true: neither, at first. If you cannot yet read kana comfortably, both of these books will hurt, and learning kana costs nothing and takes about two weeks. Do that first and both books get easier.
What I can link to, and what I cannot
This is where I have to show you my hand.
The shop I have a partnership with, The Japan Shop, stocks exactly one item relevant to this article. I checked their whole catalogue on the day I wrote this, all 1,271 products. They carry Genki volume 2, third edition, at 52 dollars. They do not carry Genki volume 1. They do not carry Minna no Nihongo in any form, in any edition, in any language. The only other things in the shop with the word Genki on them are two t-shirts, and those are the other Genki, the one that means I am well.
So if this article persuades you to buy Genki and start at the beginning, I earn nothing, because the volume you need first is not something I can sell you. If it persuades you to buy Minna, I earn nothing either. The only way this page pays me is if you are already through volume 1 and are coming back for the second half, which is a real thing that happens and a poor business model.
If you are at that point, Genki volume 2 is here. You never pay more through that link. Make sure you want the third edition, which is what they stock, and that your volume 1 is also third edition, because the kanji and vocabulary lists were renumbered between editions.
For volume 1, and for anything Minna, buy from a Japanese bookshop that ships abroad or from whichever local seller is cheapest for you. I have no stake in where.
The short version
Japanese language schools choose Minna no Nihongo over Genki by 338 to 2. That number is correct, and it is a fact about classrooms.
The main Minna volume contains no English whatsoever, by design, because the explanations were separated into a book sold on its own. For an English speaker that makes the real course four books and 9,500 yen against two books and 7,920 yen for Genki, taking about three hundred hours instead of two hundred, to arrive at the same N4.
One publisher says its book is built so the teacher can teach easily. The other says its book is built so you can prepare the grammar by yourself. Buy the one whose sentence describes your situation.