Every app has an origin story. Ours is sitting on our kitchen table in a glass jar.
My daughter and I are fans of Japanese culture — the films, the food, the design, the way the language looks on a page. At some point “we should really learn Japanese someday” turned into “let’s actually do it.” And anyone who’s started down that road knows the first real step: before grammar, before vocabulary, before anything, you learn the two kana scripts — hiragana and katakana. Ninety-two characters that unlock everything that comes after.
So we needed a way to learn them together.
It started with a jar
We did the obvious, low-tech thing. We cut up little slips of paper, wrote a kana on each one, and dropped them in a jar. You pull a slip, you say the sound, you check yourself, you put it back. It was simple, it was tactile, and — most importantly — it was fun. Pulling slips out of a jar turned practice into a little game we could play side by side. Some of those slips are still folded up in that jar today.
For the first handful of characters, it was perfect.
Then the jar started to fill up. As the number of slips climbed from a few to a few dozen — and then toward a hundred across both scripts — the little game stopped keeping up with us. There was no sense of which characters we actually knew versus the ones we kept fumbling. The ones we’d already nailed came up just as often as the tricky ones. The look-alikes that genuinely trip up every beginner got no special attention. And there was no way to see how far we’d come. The jar was a wonderful start, but it couldn’t grow with us.
Looking for the next step
So we went looking. We tried printed flash-card decks. We looked at the spaced-repetition tools people swear by. We poked around the app stores. There’s a lot of genuinely good stuff out there, and we learned something from all of it.
But nothing quite fit the way we wanted to learn — together, at our own pace, with the same easy, playful feel as the jar, but smart enough to keep up as the character count grew. We kept finding ourselves saying “this is close, but I wish it did this.”
Eventually we ran out of “I wish it did this” and landed on a different thought: we could just build the thing we wanted. I’d been wanting to make an iOS app anyway. This was the perfect reason.
What we kept from the jar — and what we added
KanaLearn is, in a real sense, the jar rebuilt to grow with you.
We kept the parts that made the jar work: short, playful sessions and instant feedback, with no self-grading and no flashcard-flipping busywork — you just answer, and your progress is recorded for you. Every character is spoken aloud in Japanese, fully offline, so pronunciation is part of practice from the very first slip.
Then we added the things a jar simply can’t do. An animated stroke-order guide so you learn to write each kana, not just recognize it — you can replay it any time. Dedicated practice for the look-alikes that catch everyone out, so the confusing pairs get the extra attention they deserve. A gentle review system that quietly surfaces the characters you’re shakiest on and eases off the ones you’ve got — no pile-ups, no guilt counter, no punishment for missing a day. A winding lesson path and a daily streak to make showing up feel good. And a Progress view that finally answers the question the jar never could: what do I actually know?
There’s one more feature that’s really the heart of it, and it’s why this post is called an origin story. For many characters, KanaLearn shows you a short origin story of its own — the ancient kanji each kana grew out of, and how the shape simplified into what you write today. It turns out the shapes are far easier to remember once you know where they came from. That little bit of history is the same thing that made us fall for Japanese in the first place.
Out now
KanaLearn is free to download, with no ads, no account, and no tracking — everything stays on your device. It’s the app we wished we’d had when we tipped that first jar of paper slips onto the table.
If you’ve ever wanted to start learning Japanese, this is the first step. We hope it’s as much fun for you as the jar was for us.
Download KanaLearn on the App Store →
— Misty Logic