Kana Cards

Learn how to read Japanese

Kana Cards is a great tool that helps you learn how to read and pronounce Japanese Katakana and Hiragana characters. Also included for free are the Kanji characters for numerals. There are a total of 244 cards in Kana Cards.

Interactive Flash Cards

Each flash card has all the information you need to learn including a play button for audio. Swiping your finger from right to left will show you the next card. You can go to the previous card by swiping from left to right.

Learn the correct pronunciation

The audio provided with Kana Cards gives you the accurate pronunciation of each character. The recording is of a native Japanese speaker. Learning the correct pronunciation, will help you read Japanese correctly and easily recognize words when listening to Japanese.

Free Bonus - Kanji Number Cards

Number flash cards have more information, including:

the Kanji for that number
the Japanese writing of the pronunciation
the English writing of the pronunciation
the translation (both written and numeral), and
a play button for audio.

Since Hiragana are used for the Japanese writing of these Kanji, learning these numbers will also give you an opportunity to use the Hiragana you just memorized.

Keep your brain on its toes

To help you better study these characters, you will be tested on:

translating Japanese to English,
transcribing Japanese to Japanese (between Katakana and Hiragana for example),
translating English to Japanese, and
recognizing the Japanese pronunciation of a character or number

Tailor your quiz

Quizzes are based on your selection of options:

testing material limited to the decks you selected
10, 25 or 50 questions to fit your schedule
with or without audio as best suits your set-up

Follow your progress

You can view a history of your results by pressing the “score” button in the quiz view. The score view will list the date of the quiz, your grade, percentage of correct questions, quiz score and the amount of time taken to complete the quiz.

Select your content

You can customize your learning material by selecting one or several decks of flash cards in the options view. For example, if you are comfortable with Hiragana but want to focus on Katakana, or if you are ready to move on to numbers, you can limit all the different views - flash cards, card table and quiz questions - to just the card decks you choose.

Start memorizing

When “touch to reveal” is “on” in the options view, your flash cards will not initially show the English pronunciation or the translation of the characters you are studying. This allows you to mentally test your knowledge of that character. You can check if you were correct by pressing anywhere on the screen and revealing the answer.

Mix things up

By activating "shuffle" in the options view, you will study flash cards in a random order within their decks. Any time you want to reshuffle the decks, all you need to do is shake your iPhone or iPod Touch to get a new randomized card order. The shuffle option will help you learn the characters without relying on a specific, set order.

Quick Look-up

To look-up a specific character, you can scroll through the list of all the flash cards you are studying, in the “card table” view. You can also jump directly to a specific deck by using the card deck menu on the right side of the screen.

Since there are many Japanese characters, we have split them in different card decks:

1.“Katakana” for the basic Katakana characters,
2.“Hiragana” for the basic Hiragana characters,
3.“k. combo” for combinations of different Katakana,
4.“h. combo” for combinations of different Hiragana,
5.“k. new” for recently created Katakana characters.

Katakana & Hiragana Cards

Each flash card contains all the information needed to learn one particular character:

the Japanese character
the English writing for its pronunciation (or “romanji”) and
a play button for audio.

To provide you with the most accurate pronunciation possible, the audio recording is by a native Japanese speaker.

Flash Card Content