Kana

Strips of paper scattered on fabric contain printed comments  from a Japanese blog.

Japanese is written using a combination of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. (Photo by hiromy on Flickr. Used with permission.)

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Course Description

Learning hiragana and katakana is an important part of reading and speaking Japanese. The following pages contain:

Hiragana - stroke order videos, pronunciation, and vocabulary for each character; reading and listening audio exercises; handouts on how to construct words and sentences; interactive quizzes testing character recognition; and printable worksheets to practice writing characters.

Katakana - pronunciation and vocabulary for each character; reading and listening audio exercises; interactive quizzes testing character and vocabulary recognition; and printable worksheets to practice writing characters.

These materials were developed as part of the Japanese curriculum at MIT for students of all levels to learn and review. Students and instructors are encouraged to incorporate them directly or as supplements in their study of Japanese.

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Related Content

Ikue Shingu, Yoshimi Nagaya, Masami Ikeda-Lamm, Tomoko Graham, and Shigeru Miyagawa. RES.21G-01 Kana. Spring 2010. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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