Practice hiragana and katakana.
Four study modes, audio pronunciation for every character, no account required.
Four ways to study
Most learners plateau because they only drill characters in one direction. Hirakata gives you four distinct modes that each build a different skill — recognition, recall, discrimination, and fluency — so the characters stick across all the ways you'll actually encounter them.
- Study — Flip cards to reveal the reading. Go at your own pace, in either direction: kana-to-romaji or romaji-to-kana. Audio plays on every flip so you build the sound association from day one.
- Quiz — Four answer choices, one correct reading. The distractor options are drawn from characters that share the same row or look similar, so you're forced to discriminate rather than guess.
- Match — A timed grid where you pair characters with their romaji. Match mode exercises the same fast-recognition skill you need when reading real Japanese text.
- Review — The full character set in a single grid view. Use this to spot gaps in your recognition before a study session, or as a quick reference when reading articles.
What's covered
The app covers all three tiers of kana in separate decks you can select individually or combine:
- Basic characters — The 46 core hiragana and 46 core katakana characters (the gojūon table)
- Dakuten & handakuten — The voiced and semi-voiced variations: が, ざ, だ, ば, ぱ and their katakana equivalents
- Contracted sounds (yōon) — The 33 combination characters: きゃ, しゅ, ちょ and their katakana counterparts
Every character includes a native-speaker audio recording so you hear the correct pronunciation, not a synthesized approximation.
Free, no account required
Hirakata runs entirely in your browser — no download, no sign-up, no subscription. Your progress isn't tracked across sessions by design: every time you open the app, you start fresh, which means the first card you see is always spaced by real time rather than an algorithm's estimate of when you last saw it.
If you're working through hiragana for the first time, the Getting Started with Hiragana guide covers what order to learn the characters and how to structure your sessions. For the science behind why active recall works, see Effective Learning Tips.