Learning the Kana: A Fresh Approach

“It’ll only take a week. Here’s the Anki deck. Rep the deck until you have them memorized.” This is the tried and true advice many beginners receive from veteran Japanese learners that came before them, but there are a number of other approaches that are employed to learn the kana. As for myself, I stumbled across one of the seemingly endless number of kana drill apps available and practiced them on my phone during my lunch breaks at work to learn them. Some people take the approach of writing them out dozens and dozens of times until they’re ingrained in memory. Others create elaborate mnemonics to remember their appearance and stroke orders. Variety is the spice of life right? Why not try them all? It’s easy to learn the kana. 46 hiragana; 46 katakana. How hard could it be? In this post, I'd like to explore common challenges learners encounter while learning the kana and how we approached resolving them in our kana learning solution.

Common Pitfalls

While all of the aforementioned methods of learning the kana are valid, there are a number of opportunities for improvement. Let's explore some of the challenges learners face while learning the kana.

1. Hidden Proficiencies

One clear issue is the idea of repping them until you “know” them. Many of the options you have for learning the kana rely on your best judgment for determining your proficiency level on a particular character. A spaced repetition software (SRS), like Anki, attempts to somewhat make this determination for you by pushing a particular kana flashcard toward a progressively larger and larger review interval the more you answer the flashcard correctly, but that approach highlights the next issue: a lack of opportunities to apply that kana in context to accelerate knowledge acquisition. Kana are most often drilled individually and outside of the context of words. While drilling them individually is a great place to start, it's easy to lose sight of how well you can identify and read a kana character within the context of a word. The sooner you can transition to reading entire words comprised of kana, the easier it’ll be for you to fully assimilate the characters into long-term memory.

2. One-Dimensional Focus

Many kana learning solutions only explore teaching the kana from the lens of recognition. While being able to recognize a hiragana or katakana character is the most important core kana skill, it's important to remember that they collectively cover all of the fundamental phonetic building blocks of the Japanese language. Wouldn't it be great to be able to start training your Japanese listening skills from the first step you take on your learning journey? Missing out on the opportunity to start building up your listening abilities is far from ideal. The emphasis on recognition also encourages many learners to skip learning how to properly write each kana character by hand. While learning how to write Japanese by hand may not seem like the most practical choice in 2025, you'll find that being able to produce a character from scratch will serve you really well in enabling you to easily disambiguate one character from another.

3. Katakana: The Neglected Script

It’s easy to forget that the kana consist of both the hiragana and katakana syllabaries. Many learner’s end up spending a significant amount of time on the hiragana while neglecting the katakana. While a strong case can be made for cleaning up any hiragana issues you may have when you get into the next phase of learning Japanese, since katakana are used much less than hiragana in written Japanese, it'll take a lot longer to overcome any weaknesses in your katakana knowledge without active practice. As a result, all too often I have encountered even self-proclaimed "advanced" students of Japanese that still make mistakes reading katakana characters. Here's a summary of a frequency analysis of a corpus based on the Asahi Shimbun from 1993 (around 56.6 million tokens) to further illustrate that the katakana aren't used as frequently as their hiragana counterparts:

Characters	Proportion of Corpus (%)
Kanji	41.38
Hiragana	36.62
Katakana	6.38
Punctuation and Symbols	13.09
Arabic Numerals	2.07
Latin Letters	0.46

A New Path

When I was working through the early iterations of what eventually became the kana learning content on Fluency Forge with Andrew, I felt really conflicted about how to best structure the learning material. Do I just create another kana drill app on Fluency Forge? Do I build out a really polished Anki deck that smoothly segways into our more advanced content? Do I even bother teaching kana through Fluency Forge at all? After all, the sentiment I have gathered in the years I've spent in the Japanese learning community is that the kana aren't just easy to learn, but it really doesn't matter how you learn them. From my own personal experience learning Japanese, there is some truth to that point of view, but I couldn't help but feel that there had to be a smoother way to learn the kana than haphazardly practicing them on a random phone application until you feel comfortable with them.

Spaced Repetition vs Deep Repetition

The first issue to tackle was whether or not to replicate the well-established approach of using a drill-based app or SRS deck to study the kana on Fluency Forge. It's hard to dispute the effectiveness of using spaced repetition to learn the kana and other parts of the language, so clearly we wanted to build in some kind of spaced repetition aspect into the courses, but the question was how should it be implemented. The normal experience learners have with spaced repetition solutions is as follows:

Create a flashcards based on a template. For the kana, this is normally setup with a kana character / digraph on the front of the flashcard with the rōmaji pronunciation shown on the back as the flashcard answer. The content of the flashcards are not dynamic in nature and will be reviewed in the same way each time they're reviewed.
Review the flashcards and check your understanding. If you answer a flashcard correctly, the SRS algorithm assigns a date in the future for you to review the flashcard again. If you get it incorrect, the flashcard will be reviewed until you get it correct. Each incorrect response decreases the time interval until you'll revisit the card again. If you're drilling the kana with an app, normally little is recorded about your performance, so you just setup what you think you need to work on and study.
Repeat step 2 until the interval of all of the cards is so large that you will rarely need to review them, if you haven't suspended or deleted the cards by that point.

While this approach works fairly well for learning the kana, we felt that there were some opportunities for improvement. With the approach described above, you continuously revisit each kana character out of context and in isolation. This is fine for the first time you're learning the character, but we felt it'd be better for learners to start applying learned kana by introducing words composed of kana characters. This brings in our idea of "Deep Repetition." I define deep repetition as reviewing the same skill, applied to different contexts, over a spaced period of time. The notable difference with deep repetition compared to traditional spaced repetition is that the context is changing on subsequent reviews following the original introduction of the focus content on the card. When it comes to the kana, this is done by having you attempt to read a real Japanese word using a particular kana, rather than a kana on its own, for your reviews. We also built in the idea of a truly incremental progression with PlusOne Kana. Any activity you work on within the context of the kana courses will only apply kana that you have previously learned, which allows you to review multiple kana simultaneously with each review. Another benefit of this approach is that you don't have to revisit material that will quickly become remedial for you. With PlusOne Kana, you can progress through the course from top to bottom and have a thorough understanding of the kana by the end of the course, as opposed to indefinitely drilling the kana on an app or repping SRS cards.

Expanding Dimensions

As previously discussed, many kana learning solutions apporach teaching the kana from a recognition standpoint only. For our kana courses on Fluency Forge, we settled on having 3 primary types of activities: reading, listening, and writing. The reading and listening cards also place an emphasis on keyboarding, which does have a bit of a skill gap for my gamers out there. The objective of reading cards is to type out the proper representation of the focus text from a keyboarding perspective. While this differs somewhat from the proper Hepburn representation of the Japanese text, we make sure to include the Hepburn text with a special notation that reflects where the keyboarding representation of the word differs from the Hepburn representation of the text. The listening cards test your ability to hear a Japanese character or word pronounced by having you type the Japanese you hear. I should note that every activity in our kana courses also has native audio recorded by my wife Mutsumi, who hails from Saitama prefecture in Japan. The writing courses allow you to practice your kana writing skills by either writing out kana in the app and comparing your writing against the correct stroke order animation. You can also write them out by hand using pen and paper or in our companion workbook. As some learners aren't interested in learning writing, we give learners the option to complete the course with or without writing activities. There are a few other types of activities available in our Pro Skills Course, but they're a little out of scope for this post, so I will dig into that in another post or YouTube video.

Information is Power

Fluency Forge tackles the hidden proficiencies issue by actively tracking your performance on all of the kana across the each context you practice them in. You may be wondering, how exactly does that work? Take typing out the word あおい for example. The word あおい is composed of the あ, お, and い hiragana characters. When you answer a reading exercise in the course or study mode, the correctness of your input is recorded. If you input "aei" as your answer, that response would be incorrect overall, but Fluency Forge collects individual stats at the kana character level. That means your response to would correlate to correctly reading あ and い while reading お incorrectly. Fluency Forge keeps track of the fact that you read お incorrectly by recording it in your performance stats. Having these stats available allows you to accurately target specific skills, like kana, that you need to work on. This visibiity gives you the ability to optimize your study time around what you need to work on the most and also resolves the issue of prematurely leaving the kana behind, which is often the case with the katakana as we previously discussed. Outside of the courses, there are other features on Fluency Forge you can use enable you to do just that.

The library feature of Fluency Forge enables learners to lookup skill information in the same way you would with a dictionary. If you forget how to type づ, head over to the library and look it up using the search or filtering capability. Each library entry has your performance stats for the skill you're looking at. You can see a breakdown of your performance on that skill across contexts, mark the skill for later review in the study mode, or jump into the course to revisit the learning content around that skill. The study mode allows you to setup your own custom study sessions for a subset of skills from the courses. You can filter skills, see your performance stats for each skill, choose what type of exercises you want to work on, and hop into a session. The study mode will continue to give you exercises for you to practice that meet the criteria you set until the activity database is exhausted or you end your session. A session summary will appear after your session ends that enables you to review the exercises you did, whether you got them correct or incorrect, and gives you the ability to jump back into the course where those exercises were introduced. There is also a test mode you can take advantage of if you want to quickly jump into curated tests from the courses. Unlike the study mode, the tests in the test mode always contain the same questions each time they're taken and are meant to be a good measuring stick for you to guage your proficiency. These features empower you study content on Fluency Forge in whatever way you want. If you want to take a break from the course and just do a little review, the study mode may be a better choice for you for that day. Maybe you need to look up a few things about a few kana that you have forgotten; the library has you covered. All of the features connect back to the courses and are designed for you to use as needed. If you're a returning learner that has some kana knowledge, it may make more sense for you to use the study mode first to figure out where you should start in the kana courses. The courses have completely open navigation and no limits on daily completion, so you're free to explore them as needed.

Conclusion

While most think of the kana learning process as a blip in the long Japanese learning journey, we look at it as an opportunity to lay a strong foundation for the road ahead.

We feel that our solution solves all of the commonly encountered issues with learning the kana and is the most complete kana learning solution currently available. If you create an account on Fluency Forge, you will be immediately given our hiragana and katakana courses for free, so there's no risk in getting started learning Japanese with us today. If you'd like to connect with us, or have any questions with getting started on the app, the easiest place is on our Discord server or through our contact form. If you made it this far, thank you for reading my first blog post on Fluency Forge!

References

Chikamatsu, Nobuko; Yokoyama, Shoichi; Nozaki, Hironari; Long, Eric; Fukuda, Sachio (2000). "A Japanese logographic character frequency list for cognitive science research". Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers. 32 (3): 482–500. doi:10.3758/BF03200819. PMID 11029823. S2CID 21633023