Learning hiragana and katakana in 10 days: a free study plan

Why first

Do this before you spend money

A qualified Japanese tutor costs $20–$35 an hour. Spending that hour on あ, い, う, え, お is the worst trade in language learning. Kana are a closed set of about 100 symbols with fixed sounds and no exceptions worth mentioning. You can learn them alone, for free, in the time it takes to finish a TV season.

What you cannot learn alone is everything a tutor is actually good at: whether your pitch accent is off, why が sounds wrong where は belongs, how to keep talking when you've lost the thread. Buy that. Don't buy the alphabet.

There's a second reason. Every hour you spend reading Japanese through romaji builds a habit you'll later have to break. Learners who front-load kana read faster at every stage afterwards. Learners who postpone it tend to postpone it for years.

The material

What you're actually learning

Japanese uses three scripts. Kanji are the borrowed Chinese characters, and there are thousands of them. Not today's problem. The other two are kana, and they're phonetic:

• Hiragana (ひらがな) — the rounded one. Native Japanese words, grammar particles, verb endings. This is the workhorse.
• Katakana (カタカナ) — the angular one. Loanwords, foreign names, onomatopoeia, emphasis. Fewer characters in daily use, but you'll meet them constantly on menus and signs.

Each has 46 base characters representing the same 46 sounds. Learn the sound once, and you get it in both scripts. Add a few modifiers — the two small marks called dakuten and handakuten, plus a set of combination sounds — and you can read anything phonetically.

That's the whole scope. Roughly 100 symbols, one sound each, almost no irregularity. Compared to English spelling, this is a gift.

Method

The three rules that make 10 days possible

Recognition before production

Learn to read each character before you learn to write it. Writing practice feels productive and is roughly four times slower per character. You need reading fluency to progress; handwriting is optional for most learners and can wait until day 10 or later. This single decision is what separates a ten-day plan from a two-month one.

Mnemonics, not repetition

Staring at き until it sticks is inefficient. Attaching a picture to it is not. Most learners find a visual hook for each character — a shape that looks like something whose English name starts with the right sound — and recall goes from minutes to instants. Free mnemonic sets exist for the whole syllabary; you don't need to invent them.

Short sessions, spaced out

Thirty to forty minutes a day beats a four-hour Sunday. Two fifteen-minute sessions beat one thirty-minute session. Kana are exactly the kind of arbitrary paired-association material that spaced repetition was designed for, and a free flashcard app will schedule the reviews better than you will.

The plan

Ten days, row by row

Each day: learn the new set with mnemonics (about 15 minutes), then drill everything you've covered so far with a random quiz (about 20 minutes). Do not skip the cumulative drill — it's where the retention comes from.

Days 1–5: hiragana

• Day 1 — あ, か, さ rows (15 characters). Recognition only. Expect the first row to feel slow and the third to feel faster; that's the mnemonic system starting to work.
• Day 2 — た, な, は rows (15). Watch for ぬ and め, and for は and ほ. These are the pairs most people confuse in week one.
• Day 3 — ま, や, ら, わ rows and ん (13). You now have all 46. Spend the drill time on full-set random quizzing, not on the new characters.
• Day 4 — dakuten and combinations. The two small marks turn か into が, さ into ざ, た into だ, は into ば or ぱ. Then the small ゃ, ゅ, ょ combinations: きゃ, しゅ, ちょ and friends. No new shapes, just modifiers — this is a lighter day than it looks.
• Day 5 — consolidation. No new material. Read actual words: ねこ, さかな, ありがとう. Aim for a full-set quiz at 95% accuracy under two seconds per character.

Days 6–10: katakana

• Day 6 — ア, カ, サ rows (15). Same sounds you already know, new shapes. Faster than day 1 was.
• Day 7 — タ, ナ, ハ rows (15).
• Day 8 — マ, ヤ, ラ, ワ rows, ン, and dakuten (13 plus modifiers).
• Day 9 — the confusable pairs and loanword patterns. Four characters cause most katakana errors: シ / ツ and ソ / ン. Learn the stroke-direction trick that separates them, then read loanwords — コーヒー, テレビ, アメリカ — until the long-vowel bar ー stops surprising you.
• Day 10 — mixed reading, and optionally handwriting. Read short mixed-script sentences. If handwriting matters to you, this is when to start stroke order, one row at a time, with no deadline.

Failure modes

Three mistakes that stretch this to three months

1. Learning stroke order before you can read

Handwriting is a separate skill with its own timeline, and for most learners outside a classroom it is optional. Bundling it into week one roughly triples the workload and is the most common reason a ten-day plan quietly becomes an abandoned one. Read first. Write later, if at all.

2. Keeping romaji within reach

If a romaji version of the text is visible, you'll read it. That isn't a failure of discipline; it's how reading works. Cover it. Use materials without it. The discomfort of decoding slowly is the mechanism, not an obstacle to it.

3. Alternating between the two scripts

Learning hiragana and katakana simultaneously produces interference: two shapes competing for the same sound. Finish hiragana to reliable recognition first, then start katakana. The plan above is sequential for this reason, and reordering it is the third-most-common way people lose a month.

Tools

What you need, all free

• A mnemonic set. Several complete kana mnemonic guides are published free online. Tofugu's are the best known and cover both syllabaries with a picture and story per character.
• A spaced-repetition app. Anki is free on desktop and Android, and shared kana decks already exist, so you don't need to build one.
• A random drill site. Any browser-based kana quiz that lets you select which rows to test. Real Kana and similar tools do this and cost nothing.
• Reading material. Once you've finished day 5, NHK Easy News is free and furigana-annotated, so you can read real sentences without knowing kanji yet.

Nothing on that list costs money, and nothing on it earns this site a commission. If a guide tells you that you need a paid app to learn kana, that's a sales page, not a study plan.

Day 11

What to do once you can read

Now the money question becomes worth asking. With kana under control you can use a tutor for what a tutor is uniquely good at — speaking, correction, and the parts of grammar you can't diagnose yourself — instead of paying hourly for a chart you could have read for free.

Our comparison of six online Japanese tutor platforms covers what each actually costs in 2026, with prices checked against the platforms' own pages. The short version: a qualified tutor runs $20–$35 an hour on the Western marketplaces, and considerably less on the Japan-based ones.

If you're weighing up the two biggest platforms specifically, we compare them directly in Preply vs italki for Japanese.

Published July 2026. This guide names free tools only and contains no affiliate links.