Hiragana (ひらがな) is one of Japan's two phonetic syllabaries. Each character represents a single sound — for example, あ is "a", か is "ka", み is "mi". It's the script you'll see most often in everyday Japanese: native words, grammar particles, and verb conjugations. Most learners study it first.

Katakana (カタカナ) is Japan's second phonetic syllabary. It represents the same set of sounds as hiragana — so シ and し both say "shi" — but it's used for loanwords (コーヒー = "coffee"), foreign names, scientific terms, and emphasis. Visually it tends to be more angular than hiragana's curves.

Most learners can read both scripts in 2–4 weeks with daily practice of 10–15 minutes. The 46 basic characters of each script — 92 total — are usually the goal of the first month. Spaced repetition (built into gojuon.app) shortens the curve significantly because forgotten characters resurface at the right intervals.

A handful of characters look genuinely similar — シ ツ ソ ン in katakana, ね れ わ in hiragana, the シ vs ツ confusion specifically trips up most beginners. Practice them as their own "Look-alikes" group rather than only as part of their rows. That's why gojuon.app has a dedicated look-alike section.

Gojuon literally means "fifty sounds" — the traditional Japanese name for the kana syllabary chart. The grid arranges all 46 base kana into 10 rows of vowels (a, ka, sa, ta, etc.). Calling this site "gojuon" is a nod to that classical layout, which forms the natural progression of stages here.

Yes. No login, no premium tier, no ads, no tracking beyond Cloudflare's basic edge analytics. The site is a personal project — its costs are a $5/month VPS plus a domain. Use it freely. If you want to support it, share the link.

No. Gojuon runs entirely in your browser. Your progress saves to local storage on the device you're using — there's no account to create. If you switch devices, you start fresh.