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Learn the kana
Japanese writes three scripts in a single sentence, and this section teaches two of them. Hiragana is the default one: it carries the grammar, and it also spells any Japanese word that is not written in kanji. Katakana spells foreign and borrowed words, and kanji (the third, later) carries meaning.
Kana are sounds, not letters: each character is a whole syllable, and it always sounds the same. That is why this comes first. Until you can read kana, every Japanese sentence is a row of shapes; after it, the sentence is something you can say out loud, even before you know what it means. This is the step that opens the stories.
How to work through this section
- 1 Read one chart at a time, starting with hiragana. Tap any character to hear it.
- 2 Practice it. The drill shows a character and asks for its sound, then grades your answer and comes back to whatever you keep missing.
- 3 Write it. Tracing on-screen is checked for stroke order, which is what makes a character stick.
- 4 Then do the same for katakana. It is the same sounds in a second set of shapes, so it goes much faster.
You are done here when you can read a row of the chart without checking the romaji. You do not need both scripts mastered to start reading - hiragana alone opens the first stories.
Words used on this page
- Kana:
- hiragana and katakana, taken together. Not alphabets: a kana is a whole syllable rather than a single letter, which is why there are about a hundred of them and not twenty-six.
- Romaji:
- Japanese written in the Latin letters you already read, like sakura. A crutch on the way in, not a way to read Japanese.