Japanese Kana

Two syllabaries. The same 46 sounds. One page each.

Japanese is written in hiragana and katakana, and every beginner's book gives you a chart of both and moves on. This one gives every single character a page of its own — all 92 — and then does the thing a chart cannot.

The top half of each page is the character: the shape, why it looks the way it does, numbered stroke order taken from KanjiVG, the character it is most often confused with and exactly how to tell them apart, and rows of squares to write it in until it is yours.

The bottom half is five real words that contain that character, with romaji and English, and the character picked out inside each word so your eye learns to find it. That is the skill that actually matters, and it is the one an alphabet chart never teaches.

The katakana half carries 225 borrowed words, and every one of them says where it came from — coffee from Dutch, bread from Portuguese, robot from Czech, yoghurt from Turkish. Thirteen source languages in all.

Also inside: the voiced sounds, taught once for both syllabaries; the small tsu, long vowels, and the three kana that lie about their sound; six pages on when a word is written in katakana at all; reading and writing practice with answers at the end of each part; and an index that finds any kana in one look.