About & Contact

studyhiragana.com is a free, browser-based place to learn to read and write Japanese. It starts with the two kana scripts — hiragana and katakana — and carries on into kanji, grammar and vocabulary, all built around the same idea: you learn a character by writing it, not just by looking at it.

• Kana — every hiragana and katakana character with animated stroke order, a tracing canvas, pronunciation audio, example words and printable practice sheets.
• Kanji — a 276-kanji chart in 45 lessons, a searchable library of almost 2,000 kanji with meanings, readings and JLPT levels, and recall drills that build each character from its strokes.
• Grammar — lessons with rule-by-rule exercises, so you practice a pattern right after reading about it.
• Vocabulary — a library of several thousand words with readings, meanings, audio and conjugations, plus study decks with spaced repetition.
• Games — Kana Rain, Kana Ninja, Konbini, Kana Solitaire, the Prefecture campaign, crosswords and a slot-car track, all drilling reading and writing in a different guise.

Progress is saved in your browser, so there is nothing to sign up for. The site is available in nine languages.

The stroke-order data behind every kana and every stroke-order kanji was traced by hand, stroke by stroke, rather than generated from a font. That is what lets the tracing canvas judge each stroke you draw, and what drives the animated stroke-order guides and the printable sheets. Grammar lessons are templated from Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese, with our own exercises layered on top. The spaced-repetition engine that decides what comes back for review is our own.

Study Hiragana is an independently made and run site. It is not affiliated with any school, publisher or textbook. Everything on it — the study tools, the games, the stroke data, the translations — is built and maintained by the same small team that answers the email below.

Everything on the site is free to use. It is supported by advertising and by our print shop, where you can buy the kana charts as posters. We keep advertising light — one ad on a page, never covering the content — and it never affects what you can use. See the Privacy Policy for what that means for cookies and data.

Questions, corrections and suggestions are all welcome. If you spot a stroke drawn wrong, a translation that reads oddly, or a word missing from the library, we would like to hear about it.

Email: contact@studyhiragana.com

We read everything, though replies can take a few days.