Learn hiragana and katakana step by step
Master the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries with interactive practice, repetition, and streak tracking.
What does Kana-Boo offer?
Three paths to master Japanese writing.
Hiragana
Learn and practice every Hiragana character, including dakuten, handakuten and combinations.
アKatakana
Master the Katakana syllabary with interactive exercises and quizzes.
漢KanjiN5 · N4 · N3 · N2 · N1
Learn JLPT kanji level by level, starting with N5.
Where to start
Start with the hiragana chart, move on to the katakana chart with romaji and, once kana feel automatic, take the leap to JLPT kanji, from N5 to N1.
What you will find on Kana-Boo
Kana-Boo is a free, ad-free website for practising Japanese writing. It brings together charts and quizzes for hiragana, katakana and JLPT kanji, from N5 to N1. It runs in your browser without an account, on a phone or a computer. Every page aims at the same thing: a chart to look things up and a quiz to check what you remember, in short sessions you can pick up whenever you like. Charts show each character next to its reading, and the quizzes keep count of your correct answers and your best streak, so you can see how you are doing without creating a profile.
A suggested route
If you are starting from scratch, a sensible order is to begin with the two kana scripts and leave kanji for later. Kana appear in any Japanese text and are used to write the readings of kanji, so it pays to master them first. One possible pace is a few minutes a day on hiragana, moving to katakana when you feel comfortable and, later on, opening N5 and climbing one level at a time. It is only a suggestion: if you already know kana, you can go straight to the kanji level you are studying.
What each section offers
Hiragana
The hiragana chart with its variants gathers the 46 basic characters, the dakuten and handakuten variants and the combinations, and the hiragana quiz asks about them at random, from reading to character or the other way round.
Katakana
The katakana chart with its combinations includes the romaji of every character and the katakana quiz helps you recognise them quickly, which is useful because katakana is mostly used for words of foreign origin and for names.
Kanji
In the kanji route by level you pick a level, from N5 to N1. Each level has a list with on'yomi and kun'yomi readings and meanings, plus a multiple-choice quiz with four possible answers.
An honest note: the JLPT has not published official kanji lists since 2010, so the level lists on this site are community-compiled and may differ from other sources.