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Published August 13, 2026

How to learn hiragana: a plan that takes days, not months

Hiragana is 46 characters in everyday use, arranged in a grid of five vowels by ten consonant rows, plus a handful of marks and combinations that recycle characters you already know. A workable plan: learn the chart one row at a time in gojuon order, roughly ten characters a sitting, drill recognition until you stop translating through romaji in your head, and start reading real Japanese words on day one rather than waiting until the chart is perfect. Tofugu’s hiragana guide, the best-known fast method, puts the whole job at “a couple days. A week, tops.”

Handwriting is optional at this stage. The same guide is blunt about it: learning to write “doubles or triples how long it takes to learn hiragana.” Learn to read first. Tracing still helps you connect shape to sound, so treat it as a useful extra, not a prerequisite.

The full hiragana chart: all 46 characters in gojuon order

aiueo
(vowels)あ aい iう uえ eお o
kか kaき kiく kuけ keこ ko
sさ saし shiす suせ seそ so
tた taち chiつ tsuて teと to
nな naに niぬ nuね neの no
hは haひ hiふ fuへ heほ ho
mま maみ miむ muめ meも mo
yや yaゆ yuよ yo
rら raり riる ruれ reろ ro
wわ waを wo
んん n

Read it down the columns, not across: あいうえお, かきくけこ, さしすせそ. That sequence is gojuon (五十音, gojūon, “fifty sounds”), and it is the alphabetical order of Japanese. Dictionaries index by it, verb conjugation tables are laid out on it, and station signs and menus sort by it. Learning the chart in this order costs nothing extra now and saves you real time later.

Five characters break the pattern your ears expect. し is shi, not si. ち is chi, not ti. つ is tsu, not tu. ふ sits between “hu” and “fu”, made with the lips barely touching. ん is the only kana that is a consonant on its own, and it is a full beat: にほん (nihon, Japan) is four beats, not three.

を is the odd one out. It is pronounced the same as お in modern Japanese and shows up in only one job, marking the direct object of a verb, as in 水を飲みます (mizu o nomimasu, I drink water). You will read it constantly and almost never write it in a word.

Dakuten, handakuten, and the small-kana combinations

Once the 46 are in, the rest of the syllabary is modifications of characters you already have.

Dakuten (゛, two small strokes at the top right) voices a consonant. It applies to four rows and gives you 20 more sounds: k becomes g (か ka to が ga), s becomes z (す su to ず zu), t becomes d (と to to ど do), and h becomes b (ほ ho to ぼ bo).

Handakuten (゜, a small circle) applies only to the h row and turns it into p: ほ ho becomes ぽ po. That is five more sounds, for 25 in total.

Two pairs sound identical to a modern ear. じ and ぢ are both “ji”, ず and づ are both “zu”, and じ and ず are the default spellings. You will meet ぢ and づ mostly inside compound words, so read them and do not worry about choosing between them yet.

Yoon are the small-kana combinations. Take any character in the i column, add a small ゃ, ゅ, or ょ, and the pair becomes a single beat: き ki plus ゃ gives きゃ kya. Seven characters take them (き, し, ち, に, ひ, み, り), which is 21 combinations, and the voiced forms give more (ぎゃ gya, じゃ ja, びゃ bya, ぴゃ pya). The size matters: きゃ (kya) is one beat, きや (kiya) is two.

Small っ is not a sound at all. It doubles the consonant that follows and holds a beat of silence: きて (kite, come) versus きって (kitte, stamp). Beginners routinely skip it in speech, and it changes the word.

Long vowels are written out rather than marked. おかあさん (okāsan, mother) is spelled with あ, and the “ō” sound is usually spelled with う, as in とうきょう (tōkyō, Tokyo).

Hiragana stroke order: the principles that cover almost everything

You do not need to memorise a stroke order per character. A small set of principles, shared with kanji, gets you nearly all of them right. From the general rules of stroke order: write from top to bottom and left to right; when a horizontal and a vertical stroke cross, the horizontal usually comes first; in vertically symmetrical shapes the centre comes before the left and right sides; enclosing components come before what they enclose; and minor strokes such as dots come last.

Japan’s Ministry of Education published a stroke-order handbook, 筆順指導の手びき (hitsujun shidō no tebiki), in 1958, authoritative until 1977. It exists to keep classroom teaching consistent, which is the honest frame for stroke order generally: a convention for legibility and for handwriting recognition, not a rule that makes a character wrong if you break it. Write さ in a strange order and it still reads fine; write a hundred characters that way and your handwriting looks off, and handwriting input starts guessing wrong.

How long does it take to learn hiragana?

Plan for a week and be pleasantly surprised. Tofugu’s guide reports readers getting through all of it “after a few hours” and sets the outer bound at a week, against classrooms that spend months on the same material. Ten characters a day for five days covers the base chart, and the dakuten and combination forms are mostly free once the base is solid because they reuse shapes you know.

Be honest with yourself about what “learned” means, though. Recognising あ on a flashcard in two seconds is not the same as reading あめ without stopping. That second skill only comes from reading words, and it arrives over a few weeks of ordinary study rather than from more chart drills. This is why the plan says start on real words immediately: the chart is the entry fee, not the destination.

How Moji - Learn Japanese Daily teaches hiragana

Moji for iPhone treats kana as the first stage of the study path rather than a separate course. It teaches 104 hiragana characters, the base chart plus the voiced and combination forms, and every one of them is a card paired with a real word: あ arrives with あめ (ame, rain), い with いぬ (inu, dog), か with かさ (kasa, umbrella). You are reading vocabulary from the first character, not staring at a syllable in isolation.

Kana writing practice with stroke feedback is free. It uses KanjiVG stroke data to check the strokes you draw, so it can tell you where your order went wrong instead of only whether the final shape looks close. Version 1.9.1 also added a separate Hiragana quiz deck, also free, which deals only hiragana cards, so a learner who has not touched katakana never gets ambushed by it. It quizzes the reading, in romaji, because a syllabary character has no meaning to quiz. That deck is available on the home-screen Quiz widget too, which is the difference between drilling kana when you remember to open an app and drilling it while you wait for coffee.

Moji is not a dictionary app. It is a study system with a curated order and FSRS scheduling, one path rather than a search box, which is why the kana cards hand off directly into the vocabulary that follows them.

Move to real words as fast as you can

The most common mistake with hiragana is polishing the chart for a month. Recognition of the last few stragglers gets fixed faster by meeting them inside words than by another pass through あかさたな.

In Moji the kana-stage cards feed straight into a frequency-ordered study path, so the next thing after the syllabary is the vocabulary that actually appears most, with the core particles deliberately pulled forward: は lands around position 63, を around 129, each with an example chosen to show where the particle sits. Our list of the most common Japanese words covers that early stretch, and the JLPT N5 guide maps the first level’s scope. Katakana is the natural next stop, and it goes quicker because the sounds are already yours: see the katakana guide.

If you want the chart, the writing practice, and the vocabulary that follows it in one place, Moji - Learn Japanese Daily is on the App Store, and everything described in this guide, the kana cards, the writing practice, and the Hiragana quiz deck, is in the free tier: Moji is on the App Store.

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