Hiragana is 46 basic characters plus a handful of modifications. Two weeks of focused work gets most people to fluent recognition.
It is also the step most often rushed, and rushing it is the most expensive decision available to a beginner.
Why “good enough” is not good enough
The target is not “I can work it out”. The target is instant — you see か and read ka without a pause, the way you read letters in your own alphabet.
The difference matters because reading speed caps your score in three of the four JFT-Basic sections. A learner who decodes each character spends their attention on decoding instead of on meaning. Every vocabulary word takes longer to learn. Every reading passage takes longer to process. Every practice test is slower than it should be.
Learners who half-learn kana pay interest on it for months, and most never trace their slow progress back to the cause.
A two-week method
Days 1–5: learn them in groups. Five vowels first (あいうえお), then the K row, S row, T row and so on. Five to ten new characters a day, reviewing everything previous each time.
Write them by hand as you learn. You will never write Japanese on the exam, and writing still helps — the motor action builds recognition faster than looking alone. Do not worry about beautiful strokes. This is a memory technique, not calligraphy.
Days 6–9: the modifications. Dakuten (が, ざ, だ, ば), handakuten (ぱ), small ゃゅょ combinations (きゃ, しゅ, ちょ), the small っ that doubles a consonant, and long vowels.
The small characters cause more confusion than the base set. きや and きゃ are different words. Give them real attention.
Days 10–14: speed. Stop learning, start drilling for pace. Read kana words aloud, timed. Read anything in kana. The goal now is not accuracy but automaticity.
What works
Twice a day, twenty minutes. Frequency beats duration for memorisation, decisively.
Spaced repetition. A free app that schedules reviews by forgetting curve will outperform your own judgement about what needs reviewing.
Reading real words, early. As soon as you have a row or two, start reading actual words rather than isolated characters. Characters in words stick; characters in a grid decay.
Mnemonics, if they help you. Whatever gets you through the first pass is fine. They fall away on their own once recognition is automatic.
The ones people confuse
Learn these pairs together, deliberately, because separating them later is harder:
- さ / ち
- ぬ / め
- は / ほ
- れ / ね / わ
- る / ろ
- き / さ
Then katakana
Immediately afterwards, not months later. Katakana carries an enormous share of everyday Japanese — foreign words, product names, signs, menus. Skipping it leaves a hole you will meet daily. See learning katakana.
Where this fits
For a complete beginner aiming at JFT-Basic, kana is weeks one and two and it is essentially all you do. Everything else waits. See starting from zero and the three-month plan.
When you can read any kana word instantly, take our free practice test — you will not pass yet, and seeing the shape of the thing you are aiming at makes everything afterwards make more sense.