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Hiragana and Katakana App This iOS app is ideal for those starting to learn Japanese, to remember characters and practice stroke order. Find out more Get it now	Kanji Essentials App This iOS app provides a quick reference guide for learning the 1,945 General-Use Kanji. Find out more Download
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Hiragana and Katakana App

A quick reference guide for learning Hiragana and Katakana, diacritics and digraphs.

Ideal for students who are just starting to learn Japanese, this reference guide will help you to remember the characters, practice stroke order and listen to the spoken pronunciations.

Frequently asked questions

Does Kana represent the Japanese alphabet?

Not really. Japanese Kana are syllabic writing (each character represents one syllable), consisting of Hiragana and Katakana characters – though you might consider this is somewhat similar to an alphabet.

What are diacritics?

Diacritics are accent characters which change the voiced sound of certain characters – for example カ (“ka”) becomes ガ (“ga”).

What are digraphs (compound characters)?

Compound characters (digraphs) are two Kana which are pronounced as one sound, not individually. These are formed by appending smaller versions of “ya”, “yu” and “yo” to the syllables from the “i” sounding Kana (“ki”, “shi”, “chi”, “ni”, “hi”, “mi”, “ri” and their variations) – for example キ (“ki”) + ョ (small “yo”) = キョ (“kyo”).

What are Hiragana?

The more cursive and widely used form of Kana.

• For most words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) of a Japanese origin.
• Show the pronunciation and Okurigana (endings) of Kanji characters.
• Used for grammar particles in sentences – for example, to highlight sentence topics, subjects and objects and prepositions.

What are Katakana?

The more angular form of Kana, primarily for words of foreign origin – these have the same sounds and pronunciations as Hiragana.

• Foreign words and names, such as コンピュータ (konpyu-ta, “computer”)
• Onomatopoeia, such as ワンワン (wan-wan, “woof-woof”)

Why do I need to practice stroke order?

Japanese characters are composed of strokes and each character is intended to be written in a certain order. It is very important to learn the correct stroke order as this will help you intuitively know how to write new characters and it has a big effect on how readable it ends up looking.

Why don’t some of the stroke order diagrams match the displayed Kana?

This is because the glyph (shape) of the handwritten form is different from the printed (typed) form. Example: き (ki).

How are long vowels written?

A long vowel is written in Hiragana with an extra “あ”, “い”, “う” “え” or “お” depending on the previous vowel sound – for example おねえさん (oneesan, “older sister”) or おおきい (ookii,”big”). In katakana, it’s written with a dash – for example, メール (me-ru, “email”).

How are double consonants written?

The double consonant is written by adding a small “tsu” (“っ” or “ッ”) in front of the doubled consonant syllable – for example, “どっち” (docchi, “which”).

Kanji Essentials App

A quick reference guide for learning the 1,945 General-Use Kanji officially documented by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

Ideal for students who already know Hiragana and Katakana, this learning tool will help you to:

• remember Kanji readings (Onyomi & Kunyomi)
• view and practice Kanji stroke order
• listen to Kanji pronunciations and examples
• learn Kanji compound words
• see how Kanji is used in real sentences

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Legal

Learning Japanese iPhone and iPad apps © Dale Clifford 2012-2020.
These applications made possible by the following resources:

• The Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 most commonly-used basic kanji in 1981 and is freely available. This database contains 27 seperate descriptions (cells) of each basic Japanese kanji which cover such fields as classification, frequency of use, number of strokes, pronunciation, etc.
• The KANJIDIC2 dictionary files licensed from The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike v3.0 licence.
• The KanjiVG stroke order data is copyright © 2009-2012 Ulrich Apel and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike v3.0 license.
• Sentence examples compiled by Professor Yasuhito Tanaka at Hyogo University and his students are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (France) v2.0 licence.