Learn Hiragana and Katakana Free with Cotobara

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 on 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:

1. Vowels: あいうえお, the five sounds everything else is built from.
2. The rows, one at a time: か, さ, た, な, は, ま, や, ら, わ.
3. Dakuten: the two-stroke mark that turns か into が, さ into ざ.
4. Handakuten: the small circle that turns は into ぱ.
5. Combinations: きゃ, しゅ, ちょ and the rest of the contracted sounds.

Lessons unlock strictly in order. That's not artificial gating: you answer questions by tapping the chart, and the chart holds every character you've learned so far, so lesson 12 is only a real test if you actually did 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: the chart is the lesson

The skill you're learning is a mapping, sound to shape and shape to sound, laid out on the gojuon chart. So the chart is the working surface for the whole lesson rather than something you look at afterwards. New characters are placed into it, and every question is answered by tapping it.

That has two consequences worth naming. The field of possible answers is everything you've learned so far, so the lesson gets harder by itself as you go, without anyone tuning a difficulty setting. And the chart can flip over to show its readings instead of its characters, which is the whole idea of kana in one gesture: the same map, seen as sound.

A lesson runs in four beats.

1. Meet and place. Each new character in turn, with its romaji, an example word, and audio so you hear the sound rather than guessing it from the spelling. 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. You place each character into its cell, and it's checked back one character later, so the first time you retrieve it there's already a gap in front of it.

2. Second pass. Every character again, shuffled, in a different direction from the one it was checked in. Three directions rotate:

• Sound → kana: you hear it and tap the character.
• Romaji → kana: you see "a", you tap あ.
• Kana → sound: the chart turns over to its readings, and you tap the sound.

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. Miss one and it comes back later in the run: the lesson ends only once every character has been answered correctly. The percentage you see at the end is first-try accuracy, not a pass mark; there's nothing to fail, because you don't leave until you have it. Kana is the foundation for everything else in the language, and a character you're only 60% sure of will slow down every sentence you read for the next year.

3. Build a word. Real words, spelled out of the tiles you now own; the row you just learned is what makes them readable. Skipped in the few lessons where you don't yet have the characters for any word.

4. Flow. Twenty seconds against the clock, scored in characters per minute. Accuracy is already settled by this point; speed is the part of reading kana that isn't, and it's the part that decides whether reading a sentence feels like reading or like decoding. It's skippable, and your lesson progress is saved before it starts.

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.