Learn Japanese

The aim of this website is to help you master reading Japanese characters through interactive testing. Here, you’ll find a range of practice tests where you fill in the translations of characters and words, covering hiragana, katakana, and kanji. By focusing on practical exercises, this platform ensures that you can actively apply your knowledge and track your progress. Our goal is to provide an engaging and effective way to reinforce your reading skills and build your confidence in recognizing and understanding Japanese characters.

Japanese characters

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.

Rōmaji

Rōmaji is the name for the Roman alphabetisation of the Japanese language. Reading rōmaji is straightforward and highly useful for learning other Japanese writing systems.

Pronunciation

Each vowel in Japanese has only one sound. When put together, they have no effect on each other (like in English, "oo" makes a different sound than "o".)

Consonants

Most consonants in Japanese are spoken the same as they are in English. However, there are some exceptions:

• f
  In English, f is pronounced by blowing air between your upper teeth and lower lips. In Japanese however, f is pronounced by blowing air out of both lips, as if you were wistling.
• s
  In Japanese, s is always hissed, never pronounced like z is. "sound" is an example of how the s is pronounced in Japanese, while "his" is not.
• g
  Japanese g is never pronounced the same way j is. It is pronounced like the g in "grammar" but never like the g's in "Georgia".
• r
  The r in Japanese is pronounced slightly different than the English r. In Japanese, the r is made by lightly touching the tip of your toungue to the ridge right behind your upper teeth.