Both kana syllabaries, character by character, including the combinations and the pairs that look alike until you have seen them enough times. The prerequisite step before any Japanese textbook stops using romaji.
Hiragana and katakana
Native Japanese words and grammatical particles
Loanwords from other languages, foreign names, and onomatopoeia
46
46
a, i, u, e, o
あ (a)
ア (a)
/i/ (the vowel "i")
/u/ (the vowel "u")
/e/ (the vowel "e")
/o/ (the vowel "o")
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Memory challenge
Japanese is spoken by over a hundred and twenty million people and gates access to an enormous body of literature, film, games and technical writing that is poorly served by translation. It is also the clearest case in language learning for spaced repetition: the writing system is a large set of arbitrary symbol-to-sound mappings with no shortcuts, which is exactly the memorisation problem spaced repetition was designed for.
Hiragana and katakana are forty-six characters each and take days, not months. Learning vocabulary through romanised spelling first builds a habit you will have to unlearn.
Learners neglect katakana because hiragana comes first, then struggle with loanwords. Give it equal review time — menus and product names are largely katakana.
Japanese distinguishes some words by pitch accent rather than stress. Hearing each word rather than reading it silently prevents fossilising the wrong pattern.
One deck for the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, and a beginner deck of core vocabulary and everyday phrases.
Not currently. They cover the two syllabaries and beginner vocabulary; kanji study is a separate and much larger undertaking.
Hiragana and katakana. Reading the script fluently makes every later deck and textbook usable.
It builds the script and vocabulary foundation the lowest JLPT level assumes, but it is not structured as exam preparation.
Yes — both decks download as standard .apkg files, free and without an account.