Hibi: Learn Japanese Kana

Hibi teaches you to read Japanese: one new character a day on your lock screen, and a table of every kana and kanji to drill whenever you want, until you know them the way you know the alphabet. Every morning a new character lands on your lock screen. You glance at it, you read it, you move on. That is the whole habit. Hiragana, then katakana, then the sound rules, then kanji built from parts you already know. THE TABLE The whole kana chart on one screen, hiragana and katakana, and the kanji you have seen, each cell shaded by how well you know it. Tap a row, a level, your weakest, or a set you saved, then drill to memorize. BUILT TO MAKE IT STICK A review in Hibi hides the answer. The character is on the front, you retrieve the reading from memory, then tap to reveal and rate yourself: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. That is the only honest test of whether you know it. Those ratings feed FSRS, the open spaced repetition algorithm, which schedules each character off its own forgetting curve. Get one right and it comes back after a day, then two, four, a week, a month, three, six. Miss it and it drops back down the ladder. Every character climbs from Seed to Sprout, Leaf, Bloom and Sealed, and Sealed means Hibi expects you to still know it in six months. In the best known study of foreign-language vocabulary, learners who spaced sessions eight weeks apart remembered as much five years on as learners who did twice as many sessions two weeks apart. Hibi runs on that. Reviews arrive once a day, in one batch, so they never pile up. New characters wait while too many are still fresh. Anything you keep missing collects into a Weak cards deck. Already read some kana? Tick them and they start as known. You meet every character four ways: see it, hear it, trace it in the order it is taught in Japan, then write it from memory. READ IT IN JAPAN Kana is most of what you see at street level. Menus and shop fronts are full of katakana: コーヒー, ビール, ラーメン. 106 days of kana, in the same order as every kana chart and Japanese keyboard, and you read all of it. Hibi holds the line until you can read, then hands you the kanji on the sign itself. Once 96 of your 106 kana have passed, kanji begins: one a day, each built from parts you meet first, with one reading and a story that names its parts. 日 is 口 and 一: a mouth with one line across it, the sun. Levels 1 to 3 are in now, 33 N5 kanji, all on the table too. More levels and N5 vocabulary follow as free updates. WIDGETS, NOT NOTIFICATIONS The lock screen widget does not buzz, beg, or guilt you at 9pm. It is simply there. On the home screen, a small widget for today's character and a large one for your kana board, which fills in as you learn. SUBSCRIPTION Hibi is a paid subscription. Start with 3 days free, then the subscription continues to give you every character and every widget. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. The subscription renews automatically unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel in Settings > Apple Account > Subscriptions. Privacy policy: https://hibi-kana.vercel.app/privacy Terms of use: https://hibi-kana.vercel.app/terms Questions, bugs, or feedback: [email protected]