Japanese Alphabet: Hiragana and Katakana Complete Guide (2026)

If you have just decided to learn Japanese, you have probably already hit the first wall: the writing system. English has 26 letters. Japanese has three separate scripts, and the two you must learn first — hiragana and katakana — contain 46 characters each. That sounds intimidating for about a day, and then it stops being intimidating forever, because both scripts are perfectly regular. Unlike English spelling, a kana character always makes the same sound. Once you know it, you know it.

This guide covers everything a complete beginner needs: the full hiragana chart, the full katakana chart, the gojūon (五十音) grid that organizes both, the small marks that add voiced sounds, the contracted syllables, and — the part most guides skip — exactly when Japanese writers use one script instead of the other. Every chart here is pronounceable: tap the audio buttons and you will hear a native voice say each sound.

By the end you will be able to read ねこ (cat), テレビ (television), and understand why the first one is written in hiragana and the second one is not.

---

🇯🇵 Japanese Has Three Scripts, Not One

Japanese text mixes three writing systems in the same sentence. This is not a historical accident that Japanese people are stuck with — each script does a different job, and mixing them is what makes Japanese readable without spaces between words.

A normal sentence uses all three at once:

Learn hiragana first, katakana second, kanji third. Hiragana alone lets you write any Japanese word and read children's books. Katakana unlocks menus, brand names, and roughly every modern noun borrowed from English. Kanji is a multi-year project you start after both kana scripts are automatic.

---

📊 The Gojūon (五十音): One Grid Explains Both Scripts

The Japanese call the kana chart the gojūon — literally "fifty sounds", written 五十音. It is a grid, and understanding the grid is the difference between memorizing 92 random shapes and learning one system twice.

The logic is simple. Japanese has five vowels, always in this order:

あ a · い i · う u · え e · お o

Every other kana is a consonant plus one of those five vowels. The k-row is ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. The s-row is sa, shi, su, se, so. Ten rows, five columns, and you have the whole chart. There is exactly one character that stands alone: ん (n), the only kana that is a consonant by itself.

Three rows have gaps where you might expect a character, and three sounds are irregular. This is the entire list of exceptions:

That is it. Six irregularities across 46 characters — Japanese pronunciation is dramatically more predictable than English.

---

✏️ The Complete Hiragana Chart

Hiragana is the rounded, curvy script. It is the first thing Japanese children learn and the first thing you should learn.

Hear the trickier rows spoken by a native voice:

さしすせそ the s-row · たちつてと the t-row · はひふへほ the h-row · らりるれろ the r-row

Two characters do double duty as grammar particles and change their pronunciation when they do:

• は is normally ha, but as the topic particle it is pronounced wa
• へ is normally he, but as the direction particle it is pronounced e
• を is essentially only ever the object particle, pronounced o

Your first three real words, entirely in hiragana:

ねこ neko — cat · やま yama — mountain · ともだち tomodachi — friend

---

Join more than 100,000 students learning on Univext

🔤 The Complete Katakana Chart

Katakana covers exactly the same 46 sounds with different shapes. Where hiragana is round, katakana is angular and made of straight strokes.

Katakana has one feature hiragana does not: the long vowel bar ー. Instead of writing a second vowel character, katakana stretches a sound with a dash.

コーヒー kōhī — coffee · ケーキ kēki — cake · スーパー sūpā — supermarket

Because katakana spells foreign words, you can often decode it before you know any Japanese grammar at all. Try reading these out loud:

レストラン resutoran · テレビ terebi · インターネット intānetto · アメリカ Amerika

---

🔊 Dakuten and Handakuten: Two Marks, 25 New Sounds

The 46 basic characters are not the whole sound inventory. Two small diacritics unlock the voiced consonants — and crucially, they are not new characters to memorize. They are modifiers you apply to characters you already know.

Dakuten (゛, two small strokes at the top right) turns an unvoiced consonant into its voiced pair:

Handakuten (゜, a small circle) applies only to the h-row and produces the p-sounds:

Listen to the contrast — the shape is the same, only the mark differs:

か ka → が ga · は ha → ば ba → ぱ pa

The s-row and t-row voice into each other in a way that surprises learners: し shi becomes じ ji, and ち chi becomes ぢ — also pronounced ji, but very rare in modern Japanese. Similarly つ tsu becomes づ zu, a near-duplicate of ず zu. When in doubt, じ and ず are the ones you will actually write.

---

🌀 Yōon: The Small ゃ ゅ ょ

The last piece of the system is the yōon — contracted syllables written with a full-size kana followed by a small や, ゆ, or よ. The two characters together make one syllable, not two.

Only the -i column characters take yōon: き, し, ち, に, ひ, み, り, plus their voiced forms ぎ, じ, び, ぴ.

きゃ kya · しゅ shu · ちょ cho · りょ ryo

There is a fourth small character with a completely different job: the small つ (っ, called sokuon). It does not make a sound. It doubles the consonant that follows, creating a one-beat pause:

きって kitte — stamp (vs きて kite, "come") · がっこう gakkō — school · ざっし zasshi — magazine

---

🎯 When Japanese Uses Hiragana vs Katakana

This is the question every chart-based guide leaves out, and it is what actually lets you read real Japanese. Both scripts encode the same sounds — the choice between them carries information.

The single most useful rule: if a word looks like it came from English, it is written in katakana, and you can probably guess it. Japanese has absorbed thousands of loanwords, reshaped to fit the kana syllable system.

Because Japanese is written without spaces, the script change itself acts as a word boundary. When you see the shapes switch from angular to round mid-sentence, a new word has started. Native readers use this constantly without thinking about it.

---

Join more than 100,000 students learning on Univext

⏱️ How Long Does It Actually Take?

Honest numbers, for an adult studying consistently:

The people who take six months are almost always doing one specific thing wrong: studying kana silently. Kana is a phonetic system — each character is a sound. If you learn the shapes without ever hearing or saying the sounds, you build a lookup table in your head instead of a reading reflex, and you will still be decoding character by character a year later.

---

🚀 The Fastest Way to Make Kana Stick

What works, in order of impact:

1. Say every character out loud. Silent kana study is the single biggest cause of slow progress. The script is sound — treat it as sound.
2. Learn by row, not alphabetically. The gojūon grid is a memory structure. あいうえお, then かきくけこ, then さしすせそ. Five characters a day, five days, hiragana done.
3. Write them by hand at least once. You do not need beautiful calligraphy, but the muscle memory of stroke order is what finally separates シ from ツ.
4. Read real words immediately. Do not wait until you know all 46. After the vowel row and the k-row you can already read あか (red) and いく (to go).
5. Get corrected out loud, every day. This is the step you cannot do alone with an app that only shows you cards.

That last point is where most beginners stall. You can drill hiragana against a flashcard deck forever and never find out that your ら sounds like an English R, or that you are giving きって two beats instead of three. Reading kana is a skill; pronouncing kana is a different skill, and it only improves when something listens to you and tells you what is wrong.

If you are still deciding which tool to commit to, we ranked the main options here: Best Apps to Learn Japanese in 2026 (Tested & Ranked).

---

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to learn both hiragana and katakana? Yes. Hiragana carries the grammar and katakana carries a huge share of modern vocabulary. Skipping katakana means you cannot read a menu, a train sign, or a product label. The good news is that once hiragana is solid, katakana takes roughly half the time — same grid, same sounds, new shapes.

Can I just use rōmaji instead? Rōmaji (Japanese written in the Latin alphabet) is a crutch that becomes a ceiling. Almost nothing written for Japanese people uses it, and leaning on it trains you to think of Japanese through English spelling, which distorts your pronunciation. Use rōmaji for the first week if you must, then drop it.

Which should I learn first? Hiragana, without hesitation. It is more frequent, it is required for grammar, and it teaches you the gojūon grid that katakana then reuses.

How many characters is that in total? 46 basic hiragana, 46 basic katakana. Add dakuten and handakuten to get 71 sounds per script, plus about 33 yōon combinations — but those are all rules applied to characters you already know, not new memorization.

Is Japanese pronunciation hard for English speakers? It is one of the easier parts. Japanese has five pure vowels and a small consonant inventory with very few sounds that do not exist in English. The genuine difficulties are the ら row, the difference between long and short vowels, and pitch accent — all three are best fixed by speaking with correction, not by reading about them.

What is the difference between kana and kanji? Kana (hiragana and katakana) are phonetic — each character is a sound, with no meaning of its own. Kanji are logographic — each character carries meaning and can have several readings. You need kana to read anything at all; kanji you accumulate gradually over years.

---

🎌 Start Reading Japanese Today

The Japanese writing system looks like a wall from the outside and turns out to be a staircase. Five vowels, ten consonant rows, two diacritics, one small つ. That is the entire structure of both hiragana and katakana, and a motivated adult gets through it in about six weeks.

The thing that decides whether those six weeks happen is not the chart — you have the chart, it is right above. It is whether you say the sounds out loud every day and get told when they are wrong.