Learn Hiragana & Katakana: 115 Kana Flashcards and the Look-Alike Pairs That Trip You Up

Every Japanese course starts in the same place: two syllabaries, 46 characters each, before you touch a single kanji. Deck HW4749 – Kana: Hiragana & Katakana on Flip It covers that first step in 115 cards. You get the 46 basic hiragana, the 46 basic katakana and 23 voiced hiragana, and each card has a real example word in the hint.

Sample cards

What the deck covers

Hiragana あいうえお through わをん, including the irregular readings shi, chi, tsu and fu. Katakana ア to ン, each one hinted with a loanword: カメラ kamera, コーヒー kōhī, テレビ terebi, ホテル hoteru, ヨーロッパ yōroppa, パン pan. Then the dakuten and handakuten rows が, ざ, だ, ば and ぱ. The hiragana hints add about 45 everyday words for free: いぬ inu, ねこ neko, みず mizu, やま yama, せんせい sensei, わたし watashi.

Study it by look-alike pairs

Japanese learners don't usually forget kana. What trips them up is mixing up two similar characters, and this deck shows each one on its own card. When you miss a card, check it against its twin:

• シ shi / ツ tsu and ソ so / ン n: in シ and ン the strokes rise from the bottom left. In ツ and ソ they fall from the top.
• ぬ nu / め me, ね ne / れ re / わ wa, る ru / ろ ro: look at the loop or the tail at the end of the last stroke.
• さ sa / ち chi, は ha / ほ ho, ク ku / ケ ke / タ ta, ウ u / ワ wa / フ fu, コ ko / ユ yu.

Tag these cards "pair" so you can review the whole cluster in one session.

Learn the particle readings now. The deck gives を as wo, but in modern Japanese it is pronounced o. Two more particle exceptions aren't in the deck: は is read wa and へ is read e when they work as particles (わたしは, がっこうへ). Write them in the hints of cards 26 and 29.

What to add before you move on

The hints already use spellings the deck never teaches. Write these cards yourself:

1. ぢ and づ (ji, zu). The voiced た row stops at だ, で, ど, so you have 23 dakuten cards where there should be 25.
2. The 25 voiced katakana (ガ, ジ, デ, ブ, パ…). You need them for ラジオ, モデル, ロビー and パン.
3. Yōon combinations like きゃ, しゃ, ちゃ, ニュ. Two words in the hints already use them: おちゃ and メニュー.
4. Small っ/ッ and the long-vowel mark ー. These make the double consonant in マッチ and ヨーロッパ and the long vowel in ケーキ and コーヒー.

Next decks

When you can read both scripts without hesitating, move on to vocabulary with the JLPT N5 vocabulary guide. Then start on kanji with Kanji N5 & N4. Search for HW4749 in the Flip It library to begin.