Hana LearnHana LearnAll 104 hiragana with native-style audio, stroke counts and memory hooks. Tap a character — hear it, learn it, keep it.
Hiragana is the first alphabet of Japanese — 46 base characters that can write every sound in the language. Everything else you'll ever learn (vocabulary, grammar, even kanji readings) is built on top of it, which is why every teacher starts here. This chart is the full set: the 46 gojūon, the voiced dakuten and handakuten variants, and the 33 combination sounds — 104 in total, each spoken aloud by Hana, the voice from our app.
Tap any character to hear it. You'll also get its stroke count, a memory hook, and a real example word. When the shapes start feeling familiar, test yourself with the hiragana quiz.
The "fifty sounds" table: five vowels across, consonant rows down. This is the hiragana everyone means when they say "learn your kana".
Two small strokes turn k→g, s→z, t→d and h→b. No new shapes to learn — just a new voice for characters you already know.
The little circle turns h into p. Five characters, one rule.
An i-column character plus a small ゃ・ゅ・ょ blends into one syllable: き + ゃ = きゃ (kya). These 33 round out every sound in Japanese.
Don't try to memorize the chart in one sitting — it's a week-long project at a calm pace, and rushing it just means re-learning it later.
あいうえお are the spine of the whole system: every other row is a consonant attached to these five vowels. Say each one out loud as you tap it.
Watch for し (shi) and ち (chi) — the two famous irregulars. つ (tsu) is the third. Everything else follows the vowel pattern exactly.
ふ is closer to "fu" than "hu". や・ゆ・よ matter double: they come back later in every combination sound.
The Japanese r is a soft tap, between English r and l. That's all 46 — write each one a few times from its stroke hints.
The good news: these aren't new shapes. Two small marks (゛゜) and small ゃゅょ transform characters you already know. Read through them once, then let a quiz and daily reviews do the rest.
46 basic characters (the gojūon). With the voiced dakuten and handakuten variants plus the 33 combination sounds, the complete chart is 104 — all of them are on this page with audio.
They write exactly the same sounds. Hiragana is used for native Japanese words and grammar; katakana is used for loanwords, foreign names and emphasis. Learn hiragana first, then katakana comes quickly because the sound system is identical.
Standard chart order works best: vowels first, then the K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R and W rows. Each row is just a consonant added to the same five vowels, so the system carries you.
Most learners can read all 46 basic characters within a week at 15–20 minutes a day. Reading them fast takes another couple of weeks of practice — quizzes and spaced reviews get you there.
Yes — use the print button (or your browser's print menu) and this page prints as a clean chart without the site around it.
The app version of this chart lets you draw every character with stroke-by-stroke guidance, then keeps them fresh with gentle daily reviews.
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