I wrote a Hiragana & Katakana trainer program!

I wrote a computer program to help learn to read Hiragana and Katakana. It won't teach you any words or grammar, but being able to sounds words out is a good first step.

The program is presented a bit like a game. There's a target character at the top of the screen, so you find it and click on it. Then there's a new target character, rinse and repeat. You can right-click to switch between Hiragana and Katakana modes, or hit spacebar to display stats on how many times you've clicked each character and your average speed (to help you identify which ones you're having trouble with).

The characters you click on are invisible until you mouse over them. This might seem daunting at first, but it actually has several benefits to learning. Stick with it, use this program and in a few short hours you'll have 2 of the 3 Japanese alphabets memorized pretty much forever.

Download links are here:
Windows x32: Hira_Kata_Trainer Win32
Windows x64: Hira_Kata_Trainer Win64
(the x64 version is recommended if at all possible)

Tell me what you think, or if you find any bugs.

Thank God somebody finally had the idea to create a video game that teaches hiragana and katakana!!!

In the days before computers people used to learn them by looking at them on a page and copying them onto a piece of paper with a pen or pencil....a process that oddly also only took a few short hours.

When are you going to release a game teaching the other Japanese alphabet?

I have to agree on this with Mike Cash. It took maybe 30 minutes to an hour of looking at a chart for me to recognize them well enough for me to start reading when I first started learning.

I did more or less the same thing over 20 years ago. Wrote a flashcard program for this purpose as well as for vocabulary. It was very helpful to me as well as many who used it. Some even paid me the $10 for the full version. Had to mail out a floppy disk in those days. One drawback is that the software doesn't help with the writing aspect, since writing them down is very helpful for retention. Anyway don't listen to the naysayers and がんばってください.