Hiragana & Katakana Quiz

The Full Hiragana Chart

Japanese kana are a syllabary, not an alphabet: each character is a whole syllable, and each one always makes the same sound. Once you know the 46 below, you can pronounce any Japanese word correctly, even if you have no idea what it means. Read the table across in rows of five vowels — a, i, u, e, o — which is the order every Japanese dictionary, form and phone keyboard uses.

Three characters behave slightly differently from what the pattern predicts: し is shi not si, ち is chi not ti, and つ is tsu not tu. And を is pronounced just like お — it survives only as the grammatical object marker, so you will meet it constantly in sentences and never inside a word.

The Full Katakana Chart

Katakana maps onto exactly the same sound grid. It is used for words borrowed from other languages (コーヒー kōhī, coffee), for sound effects, for scientific names, and for emphasis the way italics work in English.

Dakuten: The Same Shapes, Voiced

Two small marks change a consonant into its voiced pair. Dakuten (゙, two ticks) turns k→g, s→z, t→d, h→b. Handakuten (゚, a small circle) turns h→p. You are not learning 25 new characters here — you are learning one rule applied to characters you already know.

ぢ and づ are pronounced identically to じ and ず. They survive in a handful of words like 続く tsuzuku and 鼻血 hanaji, where the spelling reflects a sound change inside a compound. Recognize them; do not agonize over them.

Combination Kana (Yōon)

Take any character from the i column and shrink や, ゆ or よ next to it, and the two fuse into a single syllable. きゃ is kya, one beat — not ki-ya, two beats. This is what separates 病院 byōin (hospital) from 美容院 biyōin (hair salon), and it is worth getting right early.

How to Actually Learn These in a Week

1. Five rows a day, not 46 at once. Do あ-row through な-row in days one to three, は-row through ん in days four to five, then two days of pure mixed review.
2. Use a picture for every character. き looks like a key. さ looks like a fish hook. ぬ has a loop like a noodle. The sillier the image, the better it holds.
3. Drill in both directions. Recognizing あ as a is easy; producing あ when you think a is the harder skill and the one that makes typing and reading fast. Set the quiz above to Mixed.
4. Quit romaji the day you finish hiragana. Every extra week of reading Japanese through English spelling costs you pronunciation accuracy and reading speed later.
5. Read something immediately. Anything with furigana works. Recognition built in a quiz decays; recognition used in a sentence does not.

Our 7-day hiragana method lays this out day by day with the mnemonic for every character, and the hiragana & katakana guide covers the pronunciation details this page skims.

Frequently Asked Questions