How to study · 4 min
A one-week kana plan
Twenty minutes a day for seven days. Finish hiragana before touching katakana — that order confuses people least.
Do not learn both at once
The most common way this goes wrong is starting hiragana and katakana together. Putting あ next to ア looks efficient, but in practice both end up blurry.
Finish hiragana first. It is far more frequent, and since every particle and verb ending is hiragana, it pays off immediately once you look at a sentence.
Start katakana once hiragana has settled. By then you have a feel for how kana works, and the second pass goes much faster.
The seven days
| Day | Range | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | a, ka and sa rows (15) | Reading practice, then writing |
| 2 | ta, na and ha rows (15) | Review yesterday, then the new range |
| 3 | ma, ya, ra, wa rows and ん (16) | All 46 hiragana complete |
| 4 | All hiragana, shuffled | Re-drill only what you miss |
| 5 | Dakuten and handakuten (25) | Mixed in with the full set |
| 6 | Yōon (33) | Reading two characters as one sound |
| 7 | Sokuon and chōon words | Building a feel for the beat |
For katakana, run the same table again. The second pass usually takes about half the time.
How to spend the twenty minutes
- First 5 — reading practice on yesterday’s range only. Surface what slipped away first.
- Next 10 — look at today’s chart once, then go straight to writing practice. Work from the sound, not by copying the shape.
- Last 5 — reading practice mixing today with yesterday. Only a mixed range tells you whether it is really memorized.
Two ten-minute sessions, morning and evening, beat one twenty-minute block. Meeting the material twice is worth more than looking at it longer.
If a week goes by and it has not stuck
That is normal. A week gets you to "can read", not to "fluent and automatic".
Having three or four of the 46 refuse to stick is extremely common — usually in the ぬ/め, れ/わ/ね and さ/き pairs. Pulling those out for focused drilling is faster than anything else.
The records page here shows accuracy per character, so your sticking points are visible. Re-running only the low-accuracy characters beats starting all 46 over again.