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. This particular page is the clearest case on the site: everything I recommend here is free, including the tool I rank first, which was built by a Japanese government-affiliated institute. As of 4 September 2026 I hold four approved affiliate partnerships, one with JapanesePod101, two with knife retailers, and one with The Japan Shop, a bookshop approved on 4 September 2026. The first three are not connected to anything on this page. The Japan Shop is, because it sells hiragana and katakana material of exactly the kind this page is about. There is no link to it on this page, so this page still earns me nothing. 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.
Two things before the tools, because they will save you more time than any app choice.
The first is that this takes about two weeks, not two days. You will see claims about learning hiragana in a weekend. You can indeed recognise most of the characters after a weekend, in the way you can recognise a face you saw once. Reading at a speed that does not exhaust you is a different state and it arrives about two weeks later, and only if you read something every day in between.
The second is that you should spend nothing. This is the one area of Japanese learning where the free resources are not merely adequate, they are the best available, and one of them was built by a Japanese public institution. Save your money for kanji, which is where it will actually be needed.
With that said, here is what nobody tells you about the two alphabets, starting with the thing that causes the most damage.
The characters that get confused, and why printed type hides the answer
Every learner mixes up the same small set. Not because they are similar in some vague way, but for a specific reason that has a specific fix.
The pairs that cause the trouble:
- シ and ツ in katakana
- ソ and ン in katakana
- ね, れ and わ in hiragana
- さ and ち
- は, ほ and ま
- ぬ and め
Here is the thing. The difference between these characters is in the direction the strokes are written, and printed type conceals it.
Take シ and ツ, the pair that defeats everybody. On a screen they look like two dashes and a curve, arranged slightly differently, and you are left trying to memorise a small difference in angle. But when they are written by hand they are not similar at all:
- シ has two short strokes coming in from the left, and a final stroke that sweeps upward from bottom left to top right.
- ツ has two short strokes coming down from the top, and a final stroke that sweeps downward from top right to bottom left.
They move in opposite directions. Once you have written each of them a few times, the confusion does not come back, because you are no longer comparing two static shapes. You are recalling two different movements. The same is true of ソ against ン, and of the hiragana pairs above.
This is the entire argument for handwriting practice, and it is a narrow one. You do not need to develop good handwriting. You do not need to write every day for a month. Write each character about five times, once, with correct stroke order, and stop. Thirty to sixty minutes in total, spread over the two weeks. That is enough to encode the movement, and after that your time is much better spent reading.
Most kana apps will show you a stroke order animation. Watch it, then copy it on paper rather than tapping through. The value is in your hand, not your eyes.
Katakana is harder, and everybody underestimates it
Learners treat katakana as the sequel, get bored halfway, and end up permanently slower at it. Then they meet a menu.
Four reasons it is genuinely harder:
It appears less often, so you get less practice. Ordinary text is mostly kanji and hiragana. Katakana turns up in bursts, which means less incidental reinforcement, which means it decays.
Reading it is a two-step process. A katakana word is usually a loanword, so you sound it out, get a Japanese-shaped approximation, and then have to recognise the original word inside it. コンビニ is a shortened convenience store. アルバイト comes from German. リストラ is restructuring and means being laid off. The decoding step is real work that hiragana never asks of you.
It is also used for emphasis and for sound words. Not only for foreign words, which is what most courses imply. Native words get written in katakana for emphasis in the same way English uses italics, and the mimetic vocabulary of the language is full of it.
The long vowel mark ー only exists here. In hiragana a long vowel is spelled with another vowel character. In katakana it is a bar, and that bar is a full beat, which matters more than it looks. ビル is a building and ビール is beer, and the only difference is that bar.
The practical instruction: do not treat katakana as optional or later. Do the same two weeks on it that you did on hiragana, and read something katakana-heavy on purpose, which in practice means food packaging, menus, and the loanword-saturated language of anything technical.
The romaji question, answered properly
You will be told that romaji is poison and you must never touch it. That advice is too blunt, and the correct version is more useful.
Do not read romaji. Every minute you spend reading Japanese written in the Latin alphabet is a minute of practice going into a system you will abandon, and it builds a habit of converting rather than reading. Once you have kana, all your reading should be in kana.
But do type romaji, because that is what Japanese people do. I am typing this on a keyboard where I enter k-a-n-a and the machine converts. Romaji input is the standard input method in Japan for most people, not a beginner crutch. So the alphabet stays useful to you for a purpose that has nothing to do with reading.
The distinction is simple: romaji is an input method, not a writing system for you to read. Keep it in your fingers and out of your eyes.
The part every kana course skips
Here is the thing I would most want added to every hiragana app, and none of them do it properly.
Some kana are not characters. They are beat information.
- The small っ is not a sound. It is one beat of silence before the next consonant.
- The small ゃ ゅ ょ do not add a beat. They combine with the preceding character to make one beat, which is why きょ is one beat and きよ is two.
- The long vowel, whether written with a second vowel or with ー, is a second beat on the same sound.
Learning the forty six basic characters and skipping this is like learning the notes and ignoring the rhythm. It is also the exact point where kana learning connects to the rest of your Japanese, because Japanese is a mora-timed language and these small symbols are how the beats are written down.
So when you drill kana, drill them as beats, not just as sounds. Say きょう as two beats. Say がっこう as four. If you build the habit here, at the very beginning, you will avoid the single most common pronunciation problem in Japanese, which is a learner compressing long vowels because their first language compresses unstressed ones.
And one more thing the chart does not tell you
The kana chart is a spelling system, not a pronunciation guide. Three specific mismatches will confuse you in week one if nobody warns you:
- は is read wa when it is the topic particle, but ha everywhere else.
- へ is read e when it is the direction particle.
- を is a particle only, and is pronounced the same as お.
These are not exceptions you have to reason about, they are conventions to absorb. But learners regularly conclude that they have misheard something, when in fact the spelling and the sound genuinely differ. Japanese spelling has historical residue in it, exactly like English, and this is where you meet it first.
The chart is not a list. It is a grid, and the grid has three jobs
Most apps present kana as a set of characters to be memorised one at a time. That works, and it hides something structural that will matter enormously in about three months.
The chart is five vowel columns crossed with consonant rows. あいうえお, then かきくけこ, さしすせそ, and so on. It is not an arbitrary alphabet order like abcdef. It is a grid, and it does three separate jobs for you later.
Job one: it means you learn far fewer shapes than you think. The voiced sounds are not new characters. か plus two small marks is が. は plus two marks is ば, and は plus a small circle is ぱ. The marks are called dakuten and handakuten, and once you know them, the entire voiced set comes free. So the real workload is the base grid plus two diacritics plus the small combining kana, not a hundred separate symbols. Learners who count every variant as a new character talk themselves out of starting.
Job two, and this is the one nobody mentions: verb conjugation runs along the rows. Take the verb 書く, to write. Watch the last character move along the か row:
- 書かない — negative
- 書きます — polite
- 書く — plain
- 書けば — conditional
- 書こう — volitional
か, き, く, け, こ. That is one row of the chart you learned in week one, read from left to right. The largest class of Japanese verbs conjugates by sliding along a row of the kana grid, which is why Japanese conjugation is regular in a way English is not, and why it makes sense to a Japanese child who has just learned the chart.
Nobody tells beginners this, and the result is that people meet verb conjugation as an unrelated set of endings to memorise, three months after they memorised the exact grid that generates it. If you internalise the rows now, in order, that grammar arrives half-learned. It is the single highest-leverage thing about the first two weeks and it costs nothing extra. Almost no grammar app teaches conjugation this way, and there turns out to be a structural reason for that.
Job three: it is the dictionary order. Japanese sorts by this grid, called gojūon order, in dictionaries, indexes, contact lists, station signage and forms. Knowing where な sits relative to は is a small daily convenience for the rest of your life with the language.
So when you drill, drill in grid order at least some of the time. Not only in shuffled recognition mode, which is what most apps default to. Being able to recite あかさたなはまやらわ, and to run down a row, is what turns the chart into a tool rather than a list.
How I judged these
1. Does it teach stroke order and show the movement? For the reason set out above.
2. Does it drill recognition under time pressure? Recognition needs to become automatic, and automaticity comes from repeated quick recall, not from studying a chart.
3. Does it cost anything, and if so, why? In this category the bar for charging is very high, because the free options are excellent.
The comparison
| Resource | Mnemonics | Stroke order | Drilling | Cost | Can it pay me? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hiragana and Katakana Memory Hint | Yes, with pictures, sound and animation | Yes | Yes, built-in quizzes | Free, from a Japanese public institute, no ads | No |
| Tofugu kana guides | Yes, and the best written ones | Yes | Via the linked drills | Free | No |
| kana.pro | No | No | Yes. Fast, plain, web based | Free | No |
| Duolingo kana section | Some | Limited | Yes, gamified | Free | No |
| Anki | Whatever the deck has | Depends | Yes, spaced repetition | Free | No |
| App store kana apps | Varies | Usually yes | Usually yes | Free to a few dollars | No |
| WaniKani | Does not teach kana | Not applicable | Not applicable | Monthly | No — no affiliate program exists |
Notice the last column. Nothing on this page pays me anything, and I have not left a paid option out. There is no product I could put here that would beat the free ones, so there is nothing to sell you.
Resource by resource
Hiragana and Katakana Memory Hint — free, official, and the one I would start with
Two apps, one for each syllabary, built by the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute in Kansai. They use pictures, sound and animation to attach a memory hint to each character, then quiz you on it, and they include a tappable character table with audio. Free on both iOS and Android, with no advertising.
I lead with this partly because it is good and partly because of where it comes from. The Japan Foundation is the public institution responsible for Japanese cultural and language promotion abroad, so this is a national language institute publishing beginner tools at no charge. It is the most credible free option in the entire category and a lot of learners have never heard of it. Can it pay me? Nothing.
Tofugu kana guides — the best mnemonics, and free
Tofugu publishes free guides to both syllabaries with mnemonic images for every character, and they are unusually well made. Mnemonics matter here because kana are arbitrary shapes and arbitrary shapes need hooks.
I will say plainly that Tofugu is a competitor of mine in search results, and I am recommending them anyway, because this is where their material is strongest and because there is nothing for either of us to sell at this stage. They also make WaniKani, which has no affiliate program, so nobody in this paragraph is getting paid. Can it pay me? Nothing.
kana.pro — plain, fast drilling in the browser
No mnemonics, no lessons, no account. It shows you a character and you type the reading, over and over, with configurable sets. This is the second half of the job: once you have hooks from the two resources above, you need speed, and speed comes from thousands of quick repetitions.
Ten minutes here a day for two weeks does more for your reading than any amount of studying a chart. Can it pay me? Nothing.
Duolingo — genuinely fine for exactly this
I have been dismissive of Duolingo elsewhere on this site, so let me be fair where it deserves it. The kana section is a reasonable use of your time. It drills recognition, the gamification suits a two week grind, and this is the phase where Duolingo strength as a habit-builder matches the task.
The problem with Duolingo for Japanese starts later, once kanji and real grammar arrive. For kana specifically it works, it is free, and if it is already on your phone you can start tonight. Can it pay me? Nothing.
Anki — if you already use it
If you already have Anki in your routine, a kana deck fits into it and needs no new habit. If you do not, do not install it for this. The setup cost is not worth it for a two week task, and kana.pro does the same job in a browser tab with no configuration. Can it pay me? Nothing.
The app store kana apps — fine, and I have not tested them
There is a large field of these, several are well reviewed, and some are genuinely nice pieces of software. I have not installed them and I am not reviewing them.
What I will say is that the differences among them matter much less than whether you do the drilling. This is the least differentiated category in Japanese learning: the content is forty six characters and everyone has the same forty six. Pick the one whose interface you like and stop researching. Can it pay me? Nothing.
WaniKani — not for this, and it tells you so
WaniKani starts after kana. It expects you to arrive knowing hiragana, and it will say so. I mention it only because it is the product I recommend most often on this site and beginners sometimes try to start there. Finish the two weeks first. Can it pay me? No, and no affiliate program exists.
A two week plan
Days one to three. Hiragana, using Memory Hint or Tofugu for the mnemonics. Write each character five times on paper with the correct stroke order. Do not try to memorise everything, just meet them all.
Days four to seven. Drill on kana.pro daily until you can read the full hiragana set without hesitation. Start reading anything short in kana. Children books, app menus set to Japanese, the kana in a manga you own.
Days eight to eleven. Katakana, the same way, including the handwriting. Expect it to feel harder and do not conclude that something is wrong with you.
Days twelve to fourteen. Mixed drilling, plus deliberately katakana-heavy reading. Food packaging is perfect, because the words are loanwords and the payoff is immediate.
Then stop drilling and start reading. Kana automaticity is finished by reading, not by more quizzes, and the reading tools worth having are the next thing to set up. That is also the point where spending money starts to make sense, and where the rest of this site becomes relevant.
One last thing, from my side of it
I learned these characters at six, over a full school year, with a workbook of squared paper and a great deal of repetition that I remember as boring. Japanese children do not learn hiragana in two weeks. They learn it across a year, slowly, alongside learning to read at all.
I mention this because adults compare themselves to an imagined native standard and conclude they are slow. You are not competing with a Japanese six year old. You are doing in two weeks something that a child does in a year, with the enormous advantage of already knowing how reading works.
What you will not get from those two weeks is the thing I have that you cannot shortcut: thirty years of seeing these shapes. Automaticity is exposure, not study. So finish the two weeks, then get the characters in front of your eyes daily, and let the fluency arrive on its own schedule while you work on something else.