You cannot start Japanese vocabulary without kana. Romaji is a dead end — it hides pronunciation, it hides word boundaries, and every hour you spend reading Japanese in Latin letters is an hour you'll spend unlearning later.
So Cotobara includes a complete hiragana and katakana course, free on every account, before the vocabulary starts. This post covers what's in it.
(For the background — what kana are, why there are two sets, and how they're used — read the hiragana and katakana guide first.)
The shape of the course
16 lessons per script, 32 in total, in the order the scripts are actually structured:
- Vowels — あいうえお, the five sounds everything else is built from.
- The rows, one at a time — か, さ, た, な, は, ま, や, ら, わ.
- Dakuten — the two-stroke mark that turns か into が, さ into ざ.
- Handakuten — the small circle that turns は into ぱ.
- Combinations — きゃ, しゅ, ちょ and the rest of the contracted sounds.
Lessons unlock strictly in order. That's not artificial gating — each row's quiz draws its wrong answers from every character you've learned so far, so lesson 12 is only a real test if you actually passed lessons 1 through 11. Building up in order is also how the script itself is organized: once you see that か/き/く/け/こ is one consonant across five vowels, you're learning a small grid rather than 46 unrelated squiggles.
Inside a lesson
Each lesson has two parts.
The walkthrough. Each character in turn, with its romaji, an example word that uses it, and audio that plays automatically so you hear the sound rather than guessing it from the romaji. This matters more than it sounds — Japanese vowels aren't English vowels, and learning す as "soo" from the spelling is a habit you'll be correcting for years.
The quiz. Six to twelve questions rotating three types:
- Kana → romaji — you see あ, you pick "a".
- Romaji → kana — you see "a", you pick あ.
- Sound → kana — you hear it and pick the character.
Three directions, because recognizing a character isn't the same skill as producing it, and neither is the same as recognizing it by ear. Most kana apps only test the first. Wrong answers are drawn from everything you've learned, so the lookalikes that actually confuse people — さ/ち, ソ/ン, シ/ツ — end up next to each other on purpose. There's a brief pause after each answer so you actually see what the right one was.
Pass mark is 80%. Miss more than that and you retake the lesson. Kana is the foundation for everything else in the language, and a shaky foundation isn't something to move past quickly — a character you're only 60% sure of will slow down every sentence you read for the next year.
You can skip it — entirely or partly
At signup, Cotobara asks one question: can you already read Japanese? — both scripts, hiragana only, or neither.
- Both — the kana course is hidden from your navigation completely and you go straight to vocabulary.
- Hiragana only — hiragana is marked complete and you start on katakana, which is the usual position for self-taught learners who bounced off katakana the first time.
- Neither — you start at lesson one, and the placement test is skipped since there's nothing to place yet.
You can also skip a script (or all of kana) later from the kana home screen, behind a confirmation. Nobody should have to click through 16 lessons of a script they've read for years to prove it.
How much time it takes
Most people get functional hiragana in a few days to a week of short daily sessions, and katakana in a similar stretch — often quicker, since the structure is identical and only the shapes change. "Functional" means you can read it slowly without looking anything up. Fluent-speed reading comes from months of actually reading, not from the course.
Katakana usually feels harder even though it's the same 46 sounds, for one reason: you see far less of it. Hiragana is in every sentence; katakana shows up mostly in loanwords. The fix is exposure, not more drilling — which is why Cotobara moves you into real vocabulary as soon as you pass, rather than keeping you in kana drills.
Then the vocabulary starts
Once kana is done, the kana section disappears from your navigation and the vocabulary system takes over — 8,000+ JLPT words, five at a time, on a spaced-repetition schedule that brings each one back exactly when you're about to forget it.
The whole kana course is free, and so is the 3-words-a-day vocabulary plan after it. There's no point in a paywall between someone and the alphabet.
Start learning kana free. Already read both scripts? Skip straight to the vocabulary.