kana-trainer

Trainer for the hiragana and katakana alphabets, on desktop, tablet and phone. Built with Tauri 2 and Svelte 5, in cream paper and black ink.

What it does

• Responsive interface, the same app on a wide screen and on a phone
• Practice hiragana, katakana or both, in either direction (kana to romaji, romaji to kana or mixed)
• Three question formats: text to text, audio to text, and text to audio with a waveform for each sound
• Two answer styles: multiple choice with four options, or typing the romaji yourself
• Time trial with 5, 10, 15 or 30 seconds per question and an optional limit for the whole run
• Pick single characters, whole rows, or the characters you keep getting wrong
• Optional dakuten and handakuten rows (text to text only for now)
• Score reports saved on disk, loaded and exported as JSON files
• Charts for the characters, rows and alphabets you struggle with
• One click to turn past mistakes into a new practice set

Installing

From crates.io:

cargo install kana-trainer

Download pages at releases page.

sudo dnf install ./kana-trainer-*.rpm            # fedora, opensuse
sudo apt install ./kana-trainer_*.deb            # debian 12+, ubuntu 22.04+
chmod +x ./kana-trainer_*.AppImage && ./kana-trainer_*.AppImage
sudo pacman -U ./kana-trainer-*.pkg.tar.zst      # arch
flatpak install --user ./kana-trainer-*.flatpak  # any distro with flatpak
adb install ./kana-trainer-*.apk                 # android

Building

Requirements

• Rust 1.77 or newer
• Node 20 or newer
• On Linux: webkit2gtk 4.1, gtk3 and the distro base build tools

Commands

npm install
npm run tauri:dev     # the app
npm run check         # type check
npm run test          # unit tests
npm run test:e2e      # playwright smoke test

Keyboard Shortcuts

• 1 to 4 picks an answer in multiple choice
• Enter submits a typed answer, submits the picked sound in text to audio, and moves on after feedback
• r replays the sound in audio questions
• Escape leaves the run

Credits

• Character sounds from digitaIfabric/japanese