Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji: What to Learn First

A beginner's orientation to the three Japanese scripts · updated 2026

Japanese uses three writing systems at the same time, in the same sentence. That sounds absurd when you first hear it, and it is the point where a lot of people quietly give up. It is much less frightening once you understand what each script is actually for — and only one of them has to be learned before anything else makes sense.

The three scripts, in one table

A normal sentence mixes all three. In 私はコーヒーを飲む ("I drink coffee"), 私 and 飲 are kanji, コーヒー is katakana because coffee is a loanword, and は, を and む are hiragana doing the grammatical work.

Learn hiragana first — and learn it properly

Hiragana is the foundation. Every Japanese word can be written in it, every textbook uses it, and every kanji you meet will have its reading given in it. Until you can read hiragana, you are stuck reading romaji, and romaji quietly teaches you the wrong pronunciation habits.

The good news is that hiragana is small and completely regular. It is not an alphabet — each character is a syllable, so か is always ka and き is always ki. There are no silent letters and almost no exceptions. Most people can read hiragana slowly after about a week of daily practice, and comfortably within two or three.

Then katakana, which is easier than it looks

Katakana represents exactly the same sounds as hiragana, just with different shapes. That means you are not learning a new system, only a second set of symbols for sounds you already know. It usually takes less time than hiragana did.

Katakana is also unusually rewarding early on, because loanwords are often words you already know hiding behind unfamiliar shapes: コーヒー (kōhī, coffee), テレビ (terebi, television), パン (pan, bread). Reading a menu in Japan becomes possible far sooner than you would expect.

Kanji: start it later, but start it

Kanji is the part that takes years, and that is fine — you do not need to wait for it. Once you can read kana you can already study vocabulary, and you pick up kanji gradually as they appear in the words you are learning. That is why our flashcards put the word in kanji on the front and the kana reading on the back: you learn the word and its written form together, in context, instead of memorising two thousand isolated characters.

Two things about kanji readings that confuse beginners:

• Most kanji have more than one reading. 人 is read hito on its own (person), but jin in 日本人 (nihonjin, a Japanese person). This is normal and you learn it per word, not per character.
• Words are often part kanji, part hiragana. In 食べる (taberu, to eat), the kanji carries the meaning and the hiragana ending carries the grammar. That trailing kana is called okurigana, and it is what changes when you conjugate.

Where flashcards fit into all this

For kana, flashcards are close to ideal: 46 characters, one right answer each, pure recognition. Write or print a card per character, drill them daily, and move the ones you keep missing to the front of the pile. Two weeks of that and the job is done, permanently.

For vocabulary, cards work differently and better: the front shows the word as it is really written, and the back gives the reading and the meaning. You are not memorising a character in isolation — you are learning a word you will actually meet, with its written form attached.

A sensible first three months

1. Week 1: hiragana, 10 characters a day, then read everything you can in kana.
2. Week 2: katakana, same method. Practise on loanwords and product names.
3. Weeks 3–12: vocabulary from the frequency list, 10 words a day, kanji absorbed through the words rather than studied separately. Add basic grammar in parallel.

Three months of that leaves you able to read kana fluently and recognise several hundred common words — which is precisely the point where Japanese stops feeling like an impenetrable wall and starts feeling like a language you are slowly getting to know.