Games to learn Japanese

Games to learn Japanese, free in your browser: hiragana, katakana and your first kanji, on a computer or a phone. Nothing to download and no account: open a game and you are reading from the first tap.

Three scripts, one step at a time

Japanese is written with three systems at once. Hiragana and katakana have one character for each sound, 46 basic ones each, and take a few weeks to learn; kanji number in the thousands, and each one carries a meaning. Any sentence uses all three: kanji for the words, hiragana for endings and particles, katakana for words borrowed from other languages.

That is why the order matters. Learners start with hiragana, then katakana, which has the same sounds in different shapes, and only then kanji. The games here follow the same path.

What you can play here

• Hiragana teaches you the 104 hiragana characters one row of the chart at a time: the vowels first, then the k row, and so on up to combinations like きゃ and しょ. 60-second rounds in three ways: choose the reading, type it, or find the right character among the ones that look alike.
• Katakana is the same game for katakana, with the pairs everyone mixes up, like シ and ツ or ソ and ン, put side by side on purpose.
• Kanji Quiz is the next step: a kanji and four emoji, and you pick the one that says what it means. It starts with the kanji of the first year of a Japanese primary school.

Why by playing

Learning a script is repetition, and repetition is dull. A game with a clock running and a streak not to break does the same repetition without you noticing, and tells you at once where you go wrong: at the end of every round you get the list of characters to review. Where your device has a Japanese voice, the kana games pronounce every character too.