KanaSensei is a web app for learning to read Japanese. Practice hiragana and katakana with adaptive drills, challenges, memorable mnemonics, native audio, and progress tracking.
👋 Hey Product Hunt, I'm Samuel — the person behind KanaSensei.
Last year I went to Japan. I had the trip planned to the detail, but the moment I landed I realized I couldn't read a single thing — menus, train signs, konbini shelves, all just squiggles. I promised myself I'd actually learn to read kana before going back.
So I did what I usually do: I tried the existing apps. And they were either bloated, gamified into oblivion, or made a genuinely simple thing feel like a chore. Learning hiragana and katakana isn't a hard problem — it's ~200 characters — but everything I tried buried that under clutter.
So I built the tool I wished I'd had. Just for me, at first. Type the reading, build a streak, and lean on picture-story mnemonics that turn each character into something you literally can't forget. No noise, no 40-screen onboarding — you open it and you're learning. I obsessed over making the UX clean and the whole thing genuinely pleasant to use, because that's the part everyone else skips.
I had a stupid amount of fun building it. And once it actually got me reading kana in a couple of weeks, it seemed silly to keep it to myself — so here it is. If you've ever wanted to read Japanese and bounced off the usual apps, I made this for you too.
Would love your honest feedback — I'm right here in the comments all day. 🙏
the "picture-story mnemonic per character" approach is the right call - rote repetition is exactly where I've bounced off other apps before. the part of kana that actually got me stuck on my own trip wasn't the characters in isolation, it was the lookalike pairs, shi/tsu, ki/ka, so/n, that I'd nail individually in an app and then blank on side by side on an actual sign. does KanaSensei's drill deliberately pit those confusable pairs against each other, or is it mostly one character at a time and the mixing happens naturally once you're further into the deck
About KanaSensei on Product Hunt
“Read Japanese kana in two weeks”
KanaSensei launched on Product Hunt on August 23rd, 2026 and earned 96 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #8 on the daily leaderboard. KanaSensei is a web app for learning to read Japanese. Practice hiragana and katakana with adaptive drills, challenges, memorable mnemonics, native audio, and progress tracking.
KanaSensei was featured in Education (79k followers), Languages (14.4k followers) and Online Learning (3.6k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 42.6k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted KanaSensei?
KanaSensei was hunted by Samuel. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Samuel