What is KanaLearn ?

KanaLearn is a program to study the Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana). It consists of 3 modes: "memorize" to learn the characters, "recognize" to test your knowledge, and "reorder" to check if you know the order in which the kana appear in the Japanese alphabets.

How does it work ?

The Memorize page

This page allows you to display the hiragana and katakana alphabets. Each alphabet consists of a basic set of characters, the gojūon, which can be modified in various ways.

By adding a dakuten marker (゛), unvoiced consonants such as k or t are turned into voiced consonant such as g or d: k→g, t→d, s→z, and h→b. Kana beginning with an h can also add a handakuten marker (゜), which will change the h to a p.

A small version of the kana for ya, yu or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively) may be added to kana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide palatalization. The addition of the small y kana is called yōon.

Gojūon, dakuten, handakuten and yōon characters are displayed in the Memorize page. One can switch between the hiragana and the katakana character sets by using the radio buttons, and the corresponding rōmaji can also be displayed (rōmaji uses the latin alphabet to write the kana and is helpful for beginners).

The Recognize page

This page basically is a quiz. A kana is displayed and you have to choose the corresponding character in another alphabet. There are 5 possible choices.

The alphabets can be selected amongst hiragana, katakana, rōmaji and random. With the checkboxes, you can also choose to be tested on the gojūon only, or to include the (han)dakuten and yōon too.

The Reorder page

This page tests your knowledge of the order in which the kana appear in the Japanese alphabet. With the combobox, you can select which alphabet you want to reorder, between hiragana, katakana, the rōmaji equivalents, or even a random mix of all that.

Download

Click here to download KanaLearn. You just need to unzip the file and the program is ready.

What is next ?

This is version 1.0 of KanaLearn. I don't intend to have it evolve into something much bigger. Future extensions to the program may include the display of an animation that shows how the character should be drawn, and another page to write words presented in rōmaji in kana.