A free, self-paced textbook in 6 chapters. Read a chapter, then drill it with the 120 companion flashcards using spaced repetition.
Modern Japanese is written using two syllabaries called kana: hiragana and katakana. Each syllabary contains 46 basic characters, and together they form the phonetic foundation of...
The kana are organized into rows by their initial consonant, and each row pairs that consonant with the five vowels in the order a, i, u, e, o. The vowel row itself, sometimes call...
Kana can be modified with small marks that change the pronunciation of the consonant. The first of these is dakuten, also called ten-ten, which consists of two small strokes (゛) p...
Japanese uses a set of sounds that combine a consonant with a "y" glide, similar to the "ky" or "hy" sounds in English words like "cute" or "human". In kana, these palatalized soun...
Beyond the basic characters and their modifiers, kana writing uses a few small symbols that carry important information. The first is the sokuon, a small つ in hiragana or a small...
Putting kana into practice begins with writing the words learners meet earliest. Foreign loanwords are rendered in katakana by mapping each syllable to its closest kana. The countr...