Japanese Flashcards

Begin Japanese with the two syllabaries and a foundation of everyday vocabulary. The hiragana and katakana deck teaches the writing system itself; the basics deck builds the words and phrases that come next.

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💡 Why Study Japanese?

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.

📝 Study Tips for Japanese

Finish the syllabaries before anything else

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.

Katakana is harder than it looks

Learners neglect katakana because hiragana comes first, then struggle with loanwords. Give it equal review time — menus and product names are largely katakana.

Learn the pitch, not just the sounds

Japanese distinguishes some words by pitch accent rather than stress. Hearing each word rather than reading it silently prevents fossilising the wrong pattern.

Japanese